Bill Mauldin: 1921-2003
by John Gorenfeld

Perhaps he will change back again when he returns, but never completely. If he is lucky, his memory of those sharp, bitter days will fade over the years into a hazy recollection of a period which was filled with homesickness and horror, and dread and monotony, occasionally lifted and lighted by the gentle, humorous, and sometimes downright funny things that always go along with misery. I'd like to talk about some of the things he will remember, and then I'd like to forget them myself...
— Bill Mauldin, in "Up Front" (1944)

A business manager for a used car dealership put together the expedition, after reading on the Web that the great man was dying of Alzheimer's, divorced and alone, in a California nursing home. It was the weekend after the D.C. sniper had been caught; a new war was in the offing. Now the guys from the military history club were driving down to present Bill Mauldin with an award.

What started it all was a piece in the Chicago Tribune by Bob Greene, of all people, urging readers to sit a while with the World War II cartoonist. Years ago, Greene was a 22-year-old rookie, starstruck by working in the same building as Bill Mauldin himself; now Greene was a disgraced ex-Trib-columnist sacked for seducing teens. But his call to pay a mitzvah to an ailing cartoonist outlived the scandal, in e-mail forwards zapped across the country, so that cards, letters and photographs now poured into the small room in Orange County marked MAULDIN, WILLIAM, in a nurse's pencil.

Mauldin, Greene said, needed to hear that people appreciated what he'd done for GIs. In cartoons for Stars and Stripes, Mauldin comforted them with the misadventures of Willy and Joe, two regular guys in Italy being shot at, rained on, muddied, battered, shellshocked, unappreciated by commanders and sometimes able to crack a joke. "I never drew dead soldiers," Mauldin told an L.A. Times reporter writing for Military History Quarterly. "I always implied that they were lying just offstage. You felt the presence."

One photograph of Mauldin shows him sitting on ruins in Italy, sketching with a prankster's smirk as if whipping up the very cartoon that made General Patton flip his lid (which he did, in 1945, giving Mauldin the riot act for depicting GIs splattering officers with tomatoes). Humble and unpretentious, Mauldin's cartoons brought home a more absurd war than the one in newsreels, reminding Americans that warfare is anything but uplifting, especially for those doing the actual warring.

"Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners," went a news release. Mauldin used it as the caption for a rainy scene where haggard Joe looks more miserable than his captive. The POW is no wartime stereotype of a fascist; his arm is in a sling, and from his wry look at Joe, there's a hint of a wordless understanding between the two. Regardless of sides, they're both just guys who don't want to be there.

Sometimes Mauldin's GIs would work up the nerve to deadpan, "I was beginnin' to think nobody was home," at a door with machine gun bullets whizzing through it, or wriggle their fingers through a bullet-perforated helmet at an officer claiming the turret in question was "silenced hours ago." But, Mauldin told the Times, "War humor is very bitter, very sardonic. When someone says Willie and Joe made them laugh, I get pissed off."

The history buffs on the way to Newport were middle-aged men who also collected Civil War memorabilia on eBay. One talked of another trippy encounter with history: decades and decades ago, meeting the last living Indian Wars veteran, while training to be a paratrooper.

The buffs wondered if Mauldin would be up for signing a copy of "Up Front," and posing with them. They also wondered if the sniper could be hanged in Virginia, and were saying there ought to be more articles attacking gun control. Then we pulled into a parking lot in Newport. A fancy yellow building stood overhead — just the kind of high-class hotel fit for a Pulitzer winner.

We then entered a dumpy greenish building next to it, instead.

Mauldin was very sick, and couldn't talk; but he was wide awake. The TV overhead was tuned to the Trinity Channel, and Charleston Heston was on — had a nurse chosen it? The buffs shifted around awkwardly. They cleared their throats and presented Mauldin with a plaque they had put together, honoring Mauldin's contributions to military history.

The eyes of a world-class observer stared at them, but the expression was inscrutable — could it have been disbelief, from the guy who wrote, "Just gimme th' aspirin ... I already got a purple heart?" Or were they blocking the TV? They didn't stay long, so as not to invade his privacy.

Mauldin's contribution to understanding what people went through in World War II is bigger than politics. But just as it's a shame to forget Martin Luther King's beliefs about war, it would be a shame to overlook Bill Mauldin's cartoons about everything else.

Conservatives embrace Mauldin — for instance, this foe of "politically correct liberal trash" or this blogger demanding war with Iraq. But Mauldin's left-wing beliefs about the world should make them blanch. This was not the decadent liberal imagined in neoconservative myth as being spawned at universities, but an ordinary guy, shaped by the experience of war into making trouble for the powerful.

"I'm against oppression by whomever," Mauldin said. In civilian life as an editorial cartoonist, he was a hellraising liberal, attacking not only shabby treatment of veterans, but McCarthyism and the racism of the South. "Investigate them? Heck, that's my posse," says a sheriff in one cartoon with HOUSE UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE on his beer gut, pointing a thumb at a KKK member followed by a man labeled PROFESSIONAL BIGOT.

Papers dropped him, but he stayed fearless. When it came to other wars, he was, like most people who have seen the reality of it, no member of the pep rally. He lashed out at conservative veterans organizations for supporting Vietnam; in 1991 he was unforgiving in his opposition to the first Bush War.

Bill Mauldin died this week with war on the horizon. In this time when Greatest Generation nostalgia has made World War II familiar, its awfulness far away — with leaders comparing themselves to Churchhill, as if in some hokey, slow-motion History Channel reenactment of 1939 — it seems appropriate to wonder, what would Bill Mauldin do?

— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)