GI JOE #22
The cover loses something without Destro's sound effects:
ENYEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...........ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK...........(high pitched whistle)EEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee........KPROWWWWWWWW.....
AAAHHH....I'M HIT!.........UGH.....ECH!
OOH, IT'S SO HOT IN BATTLE, I THINK I'LL TAKE MY TOP.....
"DESTRO WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?"
"
NOTHING....UH....JUST PLANNING OUT THE STRATEGY FOR OUR NEXT ATTACK"
Roll Call: Larry Hama-writer, Mike Vosburg & Jon D'Agostino-art, Rick Parker-letters, George Roussos-colors, Denny O'Neil-editor, Jim Shooter-sitting on the reviewing stand
Mission Report: The Chaplain's Assistants return to Ft Wadsworth as does Clutch, back from furlough and Scarlett is recently backed from being briefly captured. The team is working on rebuilding the pit (isn't that a job for the Army Corps of Engineers?). They are going to make it better....stronger....faster....
The World's First Bionic Bunker!
A team is working down below, trying to reinforce support beams, which are made of timber, instead of steel and concrete, because....government contract!
A section starts to collapse and they jam a wooden beam into place and Gung Ho hammers it hme with his fists, because Marines are too stupid to use the $500 hammer, apparently.
Trip-Wire, Snow Job and Cover Girl are working on restoring the living quarters, while Snow Job slings a pile of bull at Cover Girl and Trip-Wire lives up to his name and dumps all of the crockery onto the floor. That's where we stand for characterization on the new characters added over the past year. Same below, as Torpedo is using scuba gear to work on the leaks, instead of dedicated breathing gear that would give him more time. Oh, and no one thought to pump out the water to make the leaks more accessible without breathing gear, showing that no one involved ever had damage control training, event he supposed Navy diver.
Or is that too sarcastic?
Meanwhile, Snake Eyes and Grunt are headed to McGuire AFB, in the APC and Grunt has to do a massive exposition dump......
Geez....makes Don McGregor sound terse!
Their cargo is the remains and kayak of Kwinn, which they strap onto the Dragonfly's skids (instead of using a Huey or Blackhawk utility helo, which could stow the body and gear inside; but, not....a gunship is better transport for cargo....what do I know?).
The JOEs have 6 months to build the equivalent of a 6-story building. Yeah, not in the Reagan Era. This would be a kick-back contract to a major defense contractor/political contributor, with 600% cost over-runns, shoddy workmanship, requiring redoing, and will be delayed into the Clinton Administration, where the Base Closure Committee will vote to shut it down anyway.
We then get a schematic....
One Latrine, two levels up from the living quarters, for 55 + personnel (based on the mess hall seating)?
This is a government contract!
Gung Ho is guzzling down the "bug juice", while the rest complain about C-Ration ham (Uh, no........see below) and Hawk tells them no work detail tomorrow, they have General Flagg's funeral.
So.........pound cake, anyone?
Meanwhile, Cobra Commander is taking out his frustration over his defeat by shooting up targets bearing the likenesses of the JOE team (so much for being covert operators) and Destro storms in, wanting to know why he has greenlit the deployment of their new Rattler anti-tank aircraft, before testing and CC says they lost too many aircaft to wait and need it for a special mission.
I see Cobra is run by defense contractors, just like the Pentagon. Even world conquerors are at mercy of the Military-Industrial-Cobra Complex.
He plans to use the aircraft to attack Gen Flagg's funeral and wipe out all of the JOEs in attendance (so guard duty is looking pretty sweet, right now).
Elsewhere, in Switzerland, Major Bludd brings the Baroness to the Bern Institute of Reconstructive Surgery, to a Doktor Hundtkinder (who must be ducking process servers with paternity suits)....
Snake Eyes and Wild bill place Kwinn's body in his kayak and set him adrift in Arctic waters.
The next day, we are in Arlington National Cemetar, for the Old Guard to bury Gen Flagg, while the JOE team is improperly attired.....
A Rattler swoops down, prepairing for a ground attack, when he is blown out of the sky by two new figures.....
Rock N Roll gushes look a schoolgirl in love, when he meets the machine gunner, Roadblock, wo can hold a .50 cal M2 Browning machine gun (weighing 84 lbs, unloaded) above his head and fire it....
Don't ask, don't tell.
The other guy, with the Johnny Unitas haircut, is Duke, the JOE's new First Sergeant and their worst nightmare (aside from that one where Trip-Wire carries a 5 gallon jar of nitro-glycerin through a minefield)
Elsewhere, a prison detail buries Dr Venom, in an unmarked grave.
Analysis: If I sound a little harsh here it is because this one really grates on the reality of things and annoys me; plus, it is heavy on exposition, light on logic and we are introducing new chaarcters, because of new toys, and we have a whole wave of the previous year who are nothing more than names and vague faces and military gimmicks. Only the original characters have been developed, at all, and only about half of them. It's pretty much been Hawk, Snake Eyes, Stalker, Clutch, and Scarlett. More work went into their backer card bios than the actual stories and the cartoon wasn't any better about that. You just have too many characters and a good percentage are interchangeable. Scarlett isn't that developed (well, personality-wise) and Cover Girl is just an afterthought to add another female. The rest range from insulting stereotypes (and get ready, because the 1984 toy wave gets really racist) to cannon fodder.
Logic is out the window early in this. How do you keep a massive battle at a military base, in a densely populated area (Ft Wadsworth was on Staten Island), classified? How are you supposed to have a secret facility when it has already been exposed? You do not build underground complexes with wooden timbers. You need steel beams, rebar and reinforced concrete for structural stability. If you have a flooded space, especially with electrical and electronic gear, you use water pumps to dewater the space. Then you go in and make repairs to water pipes. You should be able to shut off the water at source, which stops further flooding. Then, you conduct your repairs and test for soundness. Trust an Army guy to know jack about flooding and repairs.
There is no way the JOE team could conduct the repairs and be ready for missions. They would have to be training constantly, which means someone else, like engineers, working on rebuilding the Pitt. As it is, something of that magnitude would probably be done by civilian contractors, under Corps of Engineer supervision. In that era, there was a big push by conservative political parties in the US and abroad to privatize government programs, especially military support. The stated reason was that they were more efficient; but the more cynical reason was so that political cronies could get their hands on public money, then do a cut-rate job and pocket the profits. Defense contractors have their grubby little hands in just about everything, including transport, as was witnessed during the Iraq war, where civilian contracted drivers were being paid high wages, while military personnel were paid the same rate they got for everything, yet they were the ones sacrificing their lives for their country, without high priced contracts. Did wonders for morale.
Anyway........Hama is way out of touch with the then-Modern Military. C-Rations were long gone, by the end of Vietnam. The field rations of the era were known as MREs, Meal Ready to Eat, which is the most egregious case of false advertising in history. You could eat them, but they made better fighting gear.
Inside that heavy plastic bag, were other bagged items, including an entree, a dessert, "toilet paper" (consisting of not enough paper to make a travel kleenex tissue), gum or candy, crackers and jam or peanut butter, a drink powder and a plastic spoon (most carried their own spoon into combat). Entrees ranged from pork patties (which would constipate the heck out of you) to chicken ala king and ground beef-in-tomato-sauce (sloppy joes, but devoid of any flavor, except salt). The peanut butter was notorious for acting like a laxative and there was a chocolate cookie bar that was banned by the Geneva Convention as an inhuman weapon.
The military did not have a decent portable field stove to heat this stuff; and, unlike C-rations, which came in cans, you couldn't just put the container over a fire to heat it (or you would get a pile of melted plastic, which, to be fair, was more appetizing than the food within). Later generation rations included chemical packs, that when broken, heated the food. Word I had was that it wasn't much tastier; but, at least it was hot. If you were lucky, there might be a field kitchen, with hot chow. We carried a kitchen wherever we went, in the Navy. Ice cream, too! Most experienced guys carried things like hot sauce, to give the food some flavor and much swapping of components occurred.
"Bug juice" is a military term for kool-ade or fruit punch (also used in summer camps and boy scout troops). In the Navy, we used to use the stuff to eat away rust on nuts and bolts, as the citric acid did wonders on the stuff. Nobody ever actually drank that stuff. Most were so addicted to coffee that they had a mug permanently affixed to one hand (while the other usually held a cigarette).
The Rattler is, essentially, a barely modified A-10 Warthog....
Technically, it is the A-10 Thunderbolt II; but, it is forever known as the Warthog, in the military. It entered service in 1976, designed to deal with Cold War threats....meaning Soviet tanks. It was designed from the ground up to be a tank killer and it was a perfect killing machine. It's nose carries a 30mm rotary cannon, with spent uranium munitions, which will punch a hole through most armor. If that wasn't enough, it is armed with Maverick Air to surface missiles, which can be targeted by tv or infrared. They can also carry cluster bombs, rockets or conventional bombs. They have a slower airspeed; but are well armored and can survive multiple direct hits, while the Maverick missiles allow long range attacks, without endangering the flight crew and aircraft. They are a massively lethal close air support weapon.
And Cobra's was shot down by a handheld M2 Browning.
Don't get me started on Roadblock's yellow trousers; I know it is the 80s; but.....just....no. Yet another concession to selling toys.
I could go into how the idea of a large black man is portraying the workhorse of the team, lugging that thing around and a whole passle of racial stereotypes; but I will leave it as written. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether it was intended or just ignorant.
The real failure here lies with the funeral. This is a formal funeral, at Arlington National Cemetery, completed with gun carriage and honor guard. I'd be willing to concede the idea of the JOE Team being the honor guard, in place of The Old Guard; but, not in those damn uniforms. Hama should have known better, if anyone, given how active Arlington was during Vietnam. Gardens of Stone hadn't been released in theaters yet, so they didn't have that for reference. Basically, a funeral like that is dress uniform. For the Army, that means the Service Uniform Blue. They are drawn in Service Uniform Green; which I might let slide, except the men are all depicted wearing garrison caps (think soft cap, like a bus boy's cap), when they would be wearing a combination cover (peaked cap, like a bus driver or police officer). The biggest insult is that Gung Ho's Marine Corps Dress Blues are colored Army green, except for one panel, where only his head is visible and his cap is correctly colored as white.
Show that to a Marine and you are likely to start a riot.
Torpedo is a warrant officer, according to his backer card, which means he should be in an officer's Service Dress Whites (aka "Choker" Whites, because of the high collar) or Service Dress Blue, in winter. He is an officer, not an enlisted sailor and would not be wearing a "dixie cup." Wild Bill is wearing his cavalry hat, which is thoroughly inappropriate for a funeral. I won't even get into the beards and stubble, or Scarlett's ponytail, but I will allow Snake Eyes his mask.
I get it, this is designed to appeal to the kids who play with the toys. It's a 30 page commercial and play handbook. However, this issue is , bar none, the most insulting one to the actual military yet. I expect better from a veteran. Denny O'Neil might have been clueless; but, Larry Hama shouldn't have been, even 20 years after his service.
Charlton wasn't this bad.
Well, not always.
You want them to look like the toys on missions; fine. You put them into a solemn ceremony at Arlington, I expect some concession to what is correct and proper, to honor those who lie there. That should be a minimum.
Your mileage may vary and I wouldn't expect the average target reader of this to know or care; but, these kinds of things mean a lot to a veteran when they are done right and when done wrong, it is more of the usual ignorant civilian crap.
Issue #25 contains letters related to this issue and they are positive; though i doubt that Denny would publish negative ones. The tone of most suggests the usual ignorance of youth, particularly one who wanted to know why Torpedo was in Navy uniform (such as Vosburg could draw) at the funeral, when the JOE Team is Army. Denny or, more likely, Linda Grant, answers that the Team is made up of all of the services and then names a Coast Guard member, Cutter. There is imagination at work. The Navy gets Deep Six and Torpedo (and, down the road, Shipwreck, to really insult us) and the Marines get Gung Ho (and, in future, a fake Marine pro wrestler). The Air Force gets Ace. I suppose it is better than Zoom and at least we haven't seen Swabbie.
