Many years ago, when my marginally older brother and I were old enough to read but not quite old enough to cook breakfast ourselves, we had only one screen in the house. (Don’t be outraged. Civilization somehow survived.) It was a 16-inch black-and-white Philco that my parents had put on a cart with casters so it could be wheeled from the living room to the dining room, or wherever we decided to watch Chet and David or My Mother the Car.
David and I were early risers. Like 5:30-in-the-morning early risers. We had been given strict instructions by our parents not to wake them, under penalty of a tongue-lashing. Our go-to activity at that hour was to wheel the television into the living room and watch early-morning programming. We had two choices: CBS’s Sunrise Semester, a series of lectures from NYU on topics such as art history, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, the history of African civilization, and communication studies exploring media’s societal impact; or NBC’s Modern Farmer, where I remember being taught how to grow strawberries and the effects of a 5-10-15 nutrient ratio.
As captivating as these shows appear in retrospect, shockingly, they didn’t hold two young boys’ attention. Apparently, lectures on astronomy and proper strawberry fertilization had limits. Often, that put us on a path toward behavior that seemed completely logical to us but was not viewed quite the same way by our parents. For example, I remember one occasion when David thought it was a great idea to make a Boston Cream Pie for my mother (don’t ask). Unfortunately, his reading skills were not quite up to the task at hand, so he simply added the ingredients to a bowl, placed them in an unlit oven, and waited for the magic to happen.
Needless to say, Mom was not thrilled with our efforts or the FEMA-certified disaster zone we had managed to create in the kitchen. We were banned from the kitchen without her present and told that if “we didn’t like what was on television, we should find a book to read.” This was parenting before anyone thought to call it a content strategy.
Of course, our books were not good enough for us. We had read them all, and being young boys richly endowed with the mischief gene, we tore into our parents’ bookshelf. Not that there was much there to read, but we managed to find a few books to amuse us. Chief among them was Bill Mauldin’s “Up Front.”
If you’ve never heard of Bill Mauldin, he was a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes during the Second World War. Through two average GIs, Joe and Willie, Mauldin told the story of the war from the foot soldier’s perspective—a point of view that was not always appreciated by the upper echelons, who generally preferred their criticism filtered through several layers of rank and a freshly polished briefing table.
But we didn’t know any of that then. Despite the fact that World War II was closer to us then than 9/11 is to us now, we were just kids. They were cartoons. We thought some were funny.
Like this one.
Or this one.
It wasn’t until I was older and became a student of the Second World War that I really began to understand the subversive nature of Mauldin’s cartoons. He didn’t glorify war. He didn’t celebrate our generals. His cartoons celebrated the real hero of every war: the foot soldier. The guy in the trenches, doing his best to survive so he could go home to his family. The GI whose only defense against SNAFUs and FUBARs was to find a little humor in the absurd reality in which he found himself.
Often, that put him at direct odds with those in command. Patton particularly hated this cartoon, which is usually a reliable sign that the cartoonist had found the nerve.
In fact, Mauldin made a point of making fun of officers whenever he could, as in these cartoons. Rank, he understood, was not a vaccine against absurdity.
So why did Stars and Stripes publish the cartoons despite the very vocal complaints of famous and notoriously outspoken four-star generals? Apparently, there was once a theory that a military newspaper should occasionally be allowed to tell the truth to the military.
Part of the answer lies in the official mission of the paper.
“Stars and Stripes exists to give U.S. service members, DoD civilians, and their families independent, reliable news—separate from the military’s own public affairs and chain of command. Key elements of its mission:
Deliver news from an American troops’ perspective, especially covering communities and events relevant to military life overseas and at home.
Operate with editorial independence—while it’s authorized and partly funded by the Department of Defense, U.S. law protects it from being used as a mouthpiece for military or government messaging. It’s meant to report accurately, even when the news is unflattering to the military.
Serve as a “hometown paper” for a mobile, often overseas population, covering both world and military news and everyday features (sports, entertainment, personal stories).”
But that is only part of the story. Mission statements are lovely things; what matters is whether anyone is willing to live by them when the brass starts calling.
Joe and Willie were important because they made soldiers who were ankle-deep in mud, risking their lives every day and often suffering from the institutional blindness of command, feel seen and heard.
Being seen and heard matters because it means you are not being ignored. It means others understand what you are going through. And it strengthens unit cohesion because it makes plain that we are all in this together.
It surprises no one who has been paying attention that Commander Bone Spurs and Captain Cable News have little respect for the First Amendment. They seem to think the only important words are the ones they utter, preferably into a microphone and with no follow-up questions.
Which is why they replaced the senior editors of Stars and Stripes on Friday after those editors refused to give in to demands that they publish only articles coming directly from the military public affairs department and venerating the Field Marshal of Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, “independent newspaper” now means “press release with better typography.”
The fact that they appear unaware of the consequences of their actions is not exactly a shock either. (Iran, tariffs, mass deportations, Canada.) Foresight has not exactly been the house specialty.
When the men and women standing watch for the rest of us stop feeling seen or heard, morale doesn’t collapse with a dramatic bugle call. It leaks out slowly—one ignored complaint, one pointless directive, one senior leader insisting everything is “fine” because the PowerPoint says so. Nothing reassures a tired platoon quite like a green box on somebody else’s slide deck.
Unit cohesion depends on trust: trust that the person next to you has your back, trust that your commander knows what is actually happening, and trust that somebody above the rank of major occasionally listens to people who wear body armor instead of briefing-room badges. When that trust disappears, troops stop speaking up. Problems get buried. Good people leave. Cynicism moves into the barracks and starts collecting housing allowance—and unlike most recruits, it never seems to get transferred.
You can order people to formation. You can order them onto a ship, into a cockpit, or across a desert. What you cannot order is loyalty, confidence, or belief in leadership. Those have to be earned, which is inconvenient because earning things takes longer than issuing a memo.
And when service members begin to think their leaders are more interested in political theater, press releases, and pleasing whoever occupies the next office up than in hearing from the people actually doing the job, the military develops a dangerous problem: everyone still salutes, but fewer people believe. The ceremony remains immaculate; the confidence underneath it does not.
That is how cohesion starts to crack—not because troops suddenly stop caring about the mission, but because they begin wondering whether the people running it care about them.
We should all care about them. And what the current administration is doing to systematically destroy a military that guards our gates.
Which made me wonder what Mauldin and his muses, Joe and Willie, might think about the current situation. I suspect they would recognize the scenery immediately. So I asked my friend Chatty to help me create some Mauldin-inspired comics about this week’s actions.
For example, how the Navy in an effort to soothe the ego of a man who did all he could not serve, removing a name of Congressional Medal of Honor winner, with his own
Or scaling back needed joint military exercises with South Korea because we are stretched so thin we no longer have the capability to conduct exercises.
And maybe that is the point Mauldin would make today.
The uniforms change, the weapons get smarter, and the PowerPoints become infinitely more colorful, but the people carrying the load remain remarkably familiar. Joe and Willie understood that soldiers can endure lousy food, bad weather, absurd orders, and officers with an inflated sense of their own genius. What they cannot endure forever is being treated as scenery.
A military is strongest when the people in it believe their voices matter—not because every complaint should win the day, but because somebody is actually listening. Stars and Stripes was built to provide that voice. Turning it into another public-relations shop may make the brass more comfortable. It will not make the troops stronger. And somewhere, I suspect, Joe and Willie are sitting in the mud, looking at each other, and wondering how the hell we managed to forget something they figured out eighty years ago.
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?
Blame it on Rio
Willie and Joe
Many years ago, when my marginally older brother and I were old enough to read but not quite old enough to cook breakfast ourselves, we had only one screen in the house. (Don’t be outraged. Civilization somehow survived.) It was a 16-inch black-and-white Philco that my parents had put on a cart with casters so it could be wheeled from the living room to the dining room, or wherever we decided to watch Chet and David or My Mother the Car.
David and I were early risers. Like 5:30-in-the-morning early risers. We had been given strict instructions by our parents not to wake them, under penalty of a tongue-lashing. Our go-to activity at that hour was to wheel the television into the living room and watch early-morning programming. We had two choices: CBS’s Sunrise Semester, a series of lectures from NYU on topics such as art history, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, the history of African civilization, and communication studies exploring media’s societal impact; or NBC’s Modern Farmer, where I remember being taught how to grow strawberries and the effects of a 5-10-15 nutrient ratio.
As captivating as these shows appear in retrospect, shockingly, they didn’t hold two young boys’ attention. Apparently, lectures on astronomy and proper strawberry fertilization had limits. Often, that put us on a path toward behavior that seemed completely logical to us but was not viewed quite the same way by our parents. For example, I remember one occasion when David thought it was a great idea to make a Boston Cream Pie for my mother (don’t ask). Unfortunately, his reading skills were not quite up to the task at hand, so he simply added the ingredients to a bowl, placed them in an unlit oven, and waited for the magic to happen.
Needless to say, Mom was not thrilled with our efforts or the FEMA-certified disaster zone we had managed to create in the kitchen. We were banned from the kitchen without her present and told that if “we didn’t like what was on television, we should find a book to read.” This was parenting before anyone thought to call it a content strategy.
Of course, our books were not good enough for us. We had read them all, and being young boys richly endowed with the mischief gene, we tore into our parents’ bookshelf. Not that there was much there to read, but we managed to find a few books to amuse us. Chief among them was Bill Mauldin’s “Up Front.”
If you’ve never heard of Bill Mauldin, he was a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes during the Second World War. Through two average GIs, Joe and Willie, Mauldin told the story of the war from the foot soldier’s perspective—a point of view that was not always appreciated by the upper echelons, who generally preferred their criticism filtered through several layers of rank and a freshly polished briefing table.
But we didn’t know any of that then. Despite the fact that World War II was closer to us then than 9/11 is to us now, we were just kids. They were cartoons. We thought some were funny.
Like this one.
Or this one.
It wasn’t until I was older and became a student of the Second World War that I really began to understand the subversive nature of Mauldin’s cartoons. He didn’t glorify war. He didn’t celebrate our generals. His cartoons celebrated the real hero of every war: the foot soldier. The guy in the trenches, doing his best to survive so he could go home to his family. The GI whose only defense against SNAFUs and FUBARs was to find a little humor in the absurd reality in which he found himself.
Often, that put him at direct odds with those in command. Patton particularly hated this cartoon, which is usually a reliable sign that the cartoonist had found the nerve.
In fact, Mauldin made a point of making fun of officers whenever he could, as in these cartoons. Rank, he understood, was not a vaccine against absurdity.
So why did Stars and Stripes publish the cartoons despite the very vocal complaints of famous and notoriously outspoken four-star generals? Apparently, there was once a theory that a military newspaper should occasionally be allowed to tell the truth to the military.
Part of the answer lies in the official mission of the paper.
“Stars and Stripes exists to give U.S. service members, DoD civilians, and their families independent, reliable news—separate from the military’s own public affairs and chain of command. Key elements of its mission:
But that is only part of the story. Mission statements are lovely things; what matters is whether anyone is willing to live by them when the brass starts calling.
Joe and Willie were important because they made soldiers who were ankle-deep in mud, risking their lives every day and often suffering from the institutional blindness of command, feel seen and heard.
Being seen and heard matters because it means you are not being ignored. It means others understand what you are going through. And it strengthens unit cohesion because it makes plain that we are all in this together.
It surprises no one who has been paying attention that Commander Bone Spurs and Captain Cable News have little respect for the First Amendment. They seem to think the only important words are the ones they utter, preferably into a microphone and with no follow-up questions.
Which is why they replaced the senior editors of Stars and Stripes on Friday after those editors refused to give in to demands that they publish only articles coming directly from the military public affairs department and venerating the Field Marshal of Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, “independent newspaper” now means “press release with better typography.”
The fact that they appear unaware of the consequences of their actions is not exactly a shock either. (Iran, tariffs, mass deportations, Canada.) Foresight has not exactly been the house specialty.
When the men and women standing watch for the rest of us stop feeling seen or heard, morale doesn’t collapse with a dramatic bugle call. It leaks out slowly—one ignored complaint, one pointless directive, one senior leader insisting everything is “fine” because the PowerPoint says so. Nothing reassures a tired platoon quite like a green box on somebody else’s slide deck.
Unit cohesion depends on trust: trust that the person next to you has your back, trust that your commander knows what is actually happening, and trust that somebody above the rank of major occasionally listens to people who wear body armor instead of briefing-room badges. When that trust disappears, troops stop speaking up. Problems get buried. Good people leave. Cynicism moves into the barracks and starts collecting housing allowance—and unlike most recruits, it never seems to get transferred.
You can order people to formation. You can order them onto a ship, into a cockpit, or across a desert. What you cannot order is loyalty, confidence, or belief in leadership. Those have to be earned, which is inconvenient because earning things takes longer than issuing a memo.
And when service members begin to think their leaders are more interested in political theater, press releases, and pleasing whoever occupies the next office up than in hearing from the people actually doing the job, the military develops a dangerous problem: everyone still salutes, but fewer people believe. The ceremony remains immaculate; the confidence underneath it does not.
That is how cohesion starts to crack—not because troops suddenly stop caring about the mission, but because they begin wondering whether the people running it care about them.
We should all care about them. And what the current administration is doing to systematically destroy a military that guards our gates.
Which made me wonder what Mauldin and his muses, Joe and Willie, might think about the current situation. I suspect they would recognize the scenery immediately. So I asked my friend Chatty to help me create some Mauldin-inspired comics about this week’s actions.
For example, how the Navy in an effort to soothe the ego of a man who did all he could not serve, removing a name of Congressional Medal of Honor winner, with his own
Or scaling back needed joint military exercises with South Korea because we are stretched so thin we no longer have the capability to conduct exercises.
And maybe that is the point Mauldin would make today.
The uniforms change, the weapons get smarter, and the PowerPoints become infinitely more colorful, but the people carrying the load remain remarkably familiar. Joe and Willie understood that soldiers can endure lousy food, bad weather, absurd orders, and officers with an inflated sense of their own genius. What they cannot endure forever is being treated as scenery.
A military is strongest when the people in it believe their voices matter—not because every complaint should win the day, but because somebody is actually listening. Stars and Stripes was built to provide that voice. Turning it into another public-relations shop may make the brass more comfortable. It will not make the troops stronger. And somewhere, I suspect, Joe and Willie are sitting in the mud, looking at each other, and wondering how the hell we managed to forget something they figured out eighty years ago.
Share this:
Related
About 34orion
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?