Comic Review – Archie Goodwin – Vietcong

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1965 – Blazing Combat – spoiler alerts The opening story of the short lived four issue Blazing Combat comic series. In 1965, the Americans were officially only just getting started in Vietnam, and presenting their role there as a peace keeping, observation and advisory role though things were already getting deadly and ugly as the reality of the unwinnable conflict was becoming increasingly apparent to the men sent there. This comic strip dared to cut through the propaganda, and depicts a greenhorn Green Beret Lieutenant assisting in a retaliation strike against suspected Vietcong insurgents. The very geography seems to be fighting for the enemy, as the narrating Lieutenant can barely tolerate the flies and stench of the festering swamps he has to wade through, captured well enough for the reader to really feel for him. They find a sleepy looking Vietnamese peasant village populated only by old men, but the Lieutenant suspects all is not as it seems. He realizes this is a trap and his men capture the Viet Cong soldiers who spring up from under the floorboards. Our hero is then left in the uncomfortable position of watching his South Vietnamese allies torturing the captured men for information. The Lieutenant knows he is a passive observer to an ongoing war crime but that reporting it would get him nowhere. On the return trek through the swamp, the men come under heavy fire, and the Lieutenant realizes that he is in for a very dirty, nasty war without rules or principles. He asks chillingly if it is a war that his side can possibly win. Powerful story telling giving the facts that the newspapers were not revealing. Such candid tactics got the comic suppressed and only three more issues would ever go to press, but it is now regarded rightly as one of the most important comics in American publishing history. Arthur Chappell