Barry Kroll taught a course in the English department at Indiana called Vietnam. In an article about his course, he said he would begin the course with a question, “How would you go about finding what happened at the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War?” Students had a variety of answers, but the basic one was that they would ask someone who was there. He said, “Done, I was there, ask me,” and they did. He gave them a short answer, then shared some copies of his journal of the time that contradict (and romanticize) his contemporary version, then gave them copies of his journals written ten and twenty years later. Then he gave them various historical accounts, fiction from American and Vietnamese authors, they watched documentary and fiction films, read comic book accounts, read journalistic accounts from both western and Vietnamese newspapers. He even solicited his fellow solders' accounts of the battle, which in some ways contradicted his own memories/accounts. And so on.
To avoid a “revisionist” approach to history—i.e., the truth is whatever you say it is, because everything’s subjective--that he loathed, he helped them develop a collective sense of what really did happen there, while acknowledging the subjective truths of memory and experience. And he helped them explore the usefulness of fiction (see Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story”) in the process of approaching something so overwhelming and traumatizing as war and incarceration (also, as you know, Stephen Crane never went to a Civil War battlefield in order to write the powerfully convincing The Red Badge of Courage, but he nevertheless had soldiers thank him for detailing their actual “shared” experiences of the horrors of the battlefield.
Jacques Tardi has much written of the horrors of war in his comics fiction of WWI, and in this powerful story, he creates an historical fictional account of his father Rene as prisoner of war (we in the U.S. who never served in WWII “learned” of the P.O.W. experience through films such as The Great Escape and Hogan’s Heroes), partly informed by his Dad’s notes and by extensive research into this and other camps. This is the first volume of an omnibus story written and drawn by Jacques Tardi, just released in a wonderfully produced hardcover by Fantagraphics in December 2018 in a great English translation by Jenna Allen.
It features an introduction by another son of a P.O.W., Dominque Grange, and an introduction by Tardi about the process he went though in his attempt to allow his father to speak of his own experience. In it he fancifully features himself as a young boy—he was not born when his father was in captivity--in some of the panels, asking his father questions.
The story is grim, unpleasant, not featuring narrative heroics or some typical “rising action,” and his father is forever bitter about it, cynical; “It lasted five years!” René yells, “Let me talk about it, damn it! My belly was hollow for five years! Shit!”but you do get to like Rene and admire his tenacity and will. He's an interesting character, and I like seeing Jacques talking with him, throughout.
And somewhat like the artwork of his masterpiece of WWI, It Was the War of the Trenches, the art here is grey and black and white, bur terrific, the work of a master. His father’s talk in this book dominates many of the panels, so it feels less like a comics story and often more like an illustrated story, a series of photographs rather than a cartooned series of movements, but it is still compelling. Without question this is a great book to help one reflect on WWII from the experience of one man’s actual account, filled in by the speculation and research of his son. Much recommended, especially to those who are wanting to know more about the war. You can't romanticize military service if you read Tardi. And I think Kroll would appreciate Tardi’s approach to war “truth” and his contribution to our sense of “being there” that only a first person account can truly provide.