The Rest of Heaven Was Blue by Matthew Wilkins | Books in Review

There are a lot of Vietnam War-related graphic novels, but Matthew Wilkins’  The Rest of Heaven was Blue (Amazon Digital Services, 67 pp., $4.99, Kindle) is the first I’ve reviewed. I leafed through it as best I could on a Kindle, and it made a good impression due to the strong drawing (by Emmanuel Xerx Javier, with letters by Andy Manthei) and the vivid green of the jungle and the red of the bloodshed.  

But then I read the book carefully, frame by frame and page by page.  The good first impression did not survive.

The first thing I noticed about the drawing and presentation of the soldiers in this book is that the depictions of both our side and the enemy showed men of great musculature and size. The difference in size between the Americans and the Vietnamese is ignored. In this book the Vietnamese are not tiny the way they really were, and the Americans are not thin and underfed with that lean and hungry look.

The drawings seemed right out of the war comic books of the 1960s, which depicted soldiers on both sides the same way. My theory is that the author believed that for the VC and the NVA to do well against us, they had to be big guys. In other words: How could little tiny people kick our asses?

It saddened me how bad this graphic novel turned out to be. Javier has drawn it very strongly and the lettering by Manthei is fine, but the writing is just not good. Wilkins, for example, has an infantryman saying “If it were…”  That simply does not capture the flavor of true grunt-speak.

Another unreal sentence: “I felt engulfed in an undertow of savagery.”

After building a huge fire to sit around when in the jungle sleeping in well-built tents furnished with ground covers and sleeping bags, the men converse as though no enemy can be sneaking up on them. Grunts behaving like this on a recon patrol? Not likely. Not even possible.

While sitting by the fire one of the men says, “Back home once, I smelled a nigger burning, but what we smelled today…”  This is what passes for realistic fireside chat during patrol downtime?

Showing infantrymen sitting around a fire wearing wife-beater tee shirts, arms bare to the ten million mosquitoes and leaches, does not encourage this reader to believe that the writer and artist have done much research on the Vietnam War. I suspect that the three principals of this book are not Vietnam veterans.

Further reading tops this off with a scene of a grunt saluting with his left arm a major who arrives in a very small LZ in a helicopter delivering beer to his men. Is the salute symbolism or a mistake?

The grunt is wearing a white tee shirt. Where are the green ones we all wore?  Further, during my war, saluting of majors in the field was not required nor encouraged.

The story lost me when the men shot their own buddies on the patrol. Then, when a trooper was shown cutting an ear off of a live VC, I was ready to quit this graphic novel. But I persisted. Oh, and the knife the guy uses to saw off the ear was bigger than anything that Jim Bowie ever used.

There’s a scene I enjoyed for all the wrong reasons in which Agent Orange is sprayed from the air and the spray is lightly tinged with orange. But the name “Agent Orange” came from the color of the barrels it was stored in, not the color of the toxic herbicide.

Most of the grunts look much older than they should. They don’t appear to be teenagers and men in their early 20’s that most of us were. And w hen the troops cross a stream in the jungle, they use a swinging bridge that looks as though it came from Yellowstone Park.

All this leads me to ask the question that dogged me throughout the book: “Why do people choose to write books about subjects they know little or nothing about?”

And if they make that choice, why don’t they get close to an expert, someone who has been there and get advice and counsel? Is it hubris, sloth, ignorance, or what?

I don’t recommend this graphic novel.

The author’s web site is http://trohwb.com

—David Willson




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