Last Day In Vietnam!

Will Eisner was a master storyteller with the uncanny skill of making real people feel real, not something always well done in comics. Most of the population of the world in comics are relegated to crowd scenes, part of the mass of humanity, often speaking with one or maybe two voices in response to the activities of the heroes or villains or both. Eisner was able to pluck out especially interesting people from the background crowds and give them distinctive voices. His men had paunches or didn't and his women were sexy or not but mostly they were real.

"Last Day in Vietnam" is told from the specific limited first-person perspective of a reporter heading into the back country of Vietnam for the first time and his guide is a soldier with a smile on his face. We find a very real man, a soldier who is heading home and feeling thrilled but especially fragile now that the relative safety of the hearth is near. He's full of bravado, naivete, and you can tell he's talking to fill the air, to keep the fear from creeping in. But that fear does creep in when real immediate danger rears up and things change for him and his imagination meets his reality. We see all this from the safe distance of the reporter, so it 's best not to be too judgmental as it might be easy to be. Eisner gives us that option.

I read this story not in its original collection but in The Mammoth Book of War Comics.

Rip Off