Thank you for all of your feedback. This is extremely helpful.
I'm a Viet Nam combat veteran and while I found 'The 'Nam' to be a readable series, I didn't find it to be particularly accurate in terms of the mindset of the infantry at that time and place. The series is too informed by the author's knowledge of not only how things turned out but also by the shifting perception of what that war had been like and what it meant of the time it was written. It was an honest effort but was a product of its times, not the times it was set in.
Jon,
Thanks so much for your contribution. Were you reading comics while in Vietnam, or perhaps prior to the your involvement in the war?
This forum has been helpful, and I thank all of you who have contributed thus far. I can see there is a good group of people posting here 
Also - paw, I found the racial stereotypes to be quite blatant, from a modern standpoint. However, I also found it interesting how the roles of women and men were stressed - the heroic male figure, and often ends up taking home the woman after combat. I'm not sure how much Joe Yank and other comics resonate with gender relations during the Korean War, but it seems to reflect the role of brothels during the Vietnam War. This idea that women were necessary to lift the spirits of troops. I'm generalizing, of course, because the experience of soldiers is varied.
-Josh
-Josh
I started reading comics when I was quite young and still had a handful of relatives who were newly returned from Korea or who were still stationed there, during the nadir of the mystery man/superhero I did read my fair share of war comics but was more interested in science fiction books and what few mystery men characters from the golden age who were still being published after the comics code came into effect; horror comics certainly made a bigger impression on me during the waning of the pre-code era. I even prefered some western comics over most war comics.
I certainly did read comic books while I was in Viet Nam. Every base on was on, including some very small ones in remote areas always had used comics around; they were like communal property (so were paperback books and magazines). Playboy and sexually priurent magazine were more popular than comics. I often heard NCO denigrate the Sgt. Rock character who was the most visible symbol in comics of World War II combat (NCOs didn't like John Wayne either). War comics weren't particularly popular, but if you're exhausted and have been out in the bush for awhile, you'll read anything you can lay your hands on. A scattering of underground comix also turned up but were prized by the hipper troops and tended to be treated like private property; someone would probably let you read their copy of Zap Comics or Trashman but you were expected to return it in the same condition it was in when you first touched it. The "Bone" series by Vaughn Bode in issues of Cavalier magazine (the most literate of the skin magazines) was also prized. In Da Nang I bought a copy of Grunt Magazine which was published in country by the Army; it was not an official publications and was aimed at combat troops. Basically it featured reprints of hipper comics which had appeared in magazines like CarToons, Harvey Kurtzman's "Help" and Gilbert Shelton's "Wonder Warthog" magazine, along with bad poetry written in country by young troops (there weren't many other kinds of troopers in the infantry). Any Viet Namese village I ever went through always had a vendor who sold back issue of American comics (mostly DC and Marvel) and skin magazines; the Vietnamese didn't seem interested in the comic books themselves but realized that American troops would buy them; I did see Viet Namese children look through comics a few times, which must have been puzzling to them given the language barrier and the cultural differances. I met only one officer (a First Lieutenant who was only six or seven years older than I) who read comics, and I remember having a long conversation with him about the Iron Corporal character from Charlton, who he thought was the apex of series war characters, as well as Will Eisner (who was producing the artwork for an Army publication "PS Magazine" which was a throwback to the Army's use of cartoons and comics as educational tools in World War II (and I believe it started shortly after the Korean (undeclared) War, and Jack Cole's Plastic Man character.
There is a paucity of mention of comic books in the literature about the Viet Nam war written by veterans of that war. David Willson, author of the REMF series of novel, is the only one I know of who routinely mentions comic books, specifically the Marvel comic series "Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos." Significatly, Willson doesn't particularly like comic books and used them as a literary device. You might be able to make a thin case that the war comics of the firties and early sixties had the same effect on their readers as movies from the same era about World War II and Korea; it would be very hard to demonstrate that troops in Viet Nam were influenced by the comics they read there. Comic books had more "casual" readers in the sixties because, for the most part, stories were complete in a single issue, so they were read in Viet Nam by those who read comics regularly when they were civilians (call that group "fans") as well as casual readers who just wanted to pass some time.
Thanks for sharing this Jon.
That is interesting that the Vietnamese routinely sold back issues of comic books. How would you describe the villages that tended to sell the comics? Were they toward the rear bases? Or, were these villages that your unit patrolled through while in the bush?
Also, you identify that most avid readers of comics in Vietnam were also fans back in the United States before the war. So maybe the impact of comics (or their effect on morale) were minimal for soldiers. Would you say that anything in particular, be it literature, film, magazines, or anything else had a significant impact on soldier morale?
You mention that NCOs particularly disliked Sgt. Rock comics and John Wayne. Could you elaborate on this a bit more? What was it about these cultural figures that drew the ire of NCOs?
I think looking back at the 1950s and 1960s, it is probably easy to overestimate the influence of westerns and comic books. There sure was a lot going on.
Thanks, Jon,
Josh.
Popular music, more than any other single factor had a morale factor on troops in Viet Nam. I remember a vet who had been in-country in 1962 and 1963 telling me that, "you had better music than we did. When I got there they were playing Johnny Mathis and polka music." At last half of the combat troops ("grunts") in Viet Nam were draftees. 1966 was the last year you could call Viet Nam a "popular war" and only because of the peculiar popularity of Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets" which was, I believe the best selling song of 1966. By the time the movies "The Green Berets" was released, troops in Saigon, the safest city in Nam, rioted at the premiere of "The Green Berets" and caused an incident which was under-reported. The Youth Movement/Hippies/whatever you want to call it of the sixties grew in an amazing parallel to the troop strength of the Viet Nam War. As troop numbers rose and more and more draftees were needed, more and more of the very people the Army and the Marines least needed and wanted were sworn in (both of whom used draftees, with the Marines in 1968 being allocated one of every five draftees, the other four going to the Army). California, for example, had so many people being sentenced to prison for dealing large amounts of marijuana, LSD, etc. that they were usually offered the choice of the Army or jail; many wound up in the Army with no charges on their records. A burgeoning number of anti-war youth ironically found themselves in the most dangerous parts of Viet Nam with the most dangerous MOS (Military Occupation Specialties). They had the effect of making it legitimate to criticize the war. There was also a side effect of various drugs being introduced to many troops who had never even considered using drugs before they were drafted or joined. Armed Forces Radio network was the primary source of music (and news) in Viet Nam, and it offered a wide variety of music, but once the sun went down rock and roll ruled the airwaves and the later it got, the more psychedelic the music became. There were, of course, soldiers who did not like rock and roll and who would rather listen to country and western or soul but the fact remains that by 1967 the median age of troops in Viet Nam was nineteen. It took a hell of a lot of draftee eighteen year olds to bring the median down that far. Viet Nam had the youngest troops of any American war and they were also the least educated because of their youth. The Army also shows movies to its troops for free when feasible as a morale raiser. I can remember watching "Yellow Submarine" in a tent during a monsoon at an artillery firebase when we were pulling guard duty. The newer a movies was the more influencial it was and we were watching movies that were anywhere from brand new to a year or two old, many of which were aimed at an audience of high school and college students. Armed Forces Network also showed the only television programs in Viet Nam that were in English. Unfortunately, their news was censored, and the entertainment was all reruns of programs which were several years old. They did show sports, but no many want to watch a football game which was played four or five years before. About the only access to television most troops had were in Enlisted Men's clubs (where alcohol could be bought cheaply and there was no age limit because if you were in a combat zone (and the entire nation of Viet Nam was a combat zone) you could certainly buy a drink. Troops actually had a daily beer ration of two a day (which meant if I was out in the long, tall weeds for a month, the Army owed me and every man I was with sixty beer each. Needless to say, I never drank consumed by full beer ration but I'm sure someone else did.
I was stationed mainly in and around the A Shau Valley which had and probably doesn't have any villages. The villages I'm talking about which sold used comic books, paperbacks, magazines and anything else a GI might possibly buy also offered prostitutes, alcohol (produced by the Viets), and (not as openly) illegal drugs. Any place where two road crossed, there was usually a village of some size.
The reason most NCOs hated John Wayne and other celluloid heroes was that they felt they present a false idea of how a real soldier should act. If one acted like John Wayne in a shooting situation, one would probably be wounded or killed in a matter of minutes. The basic NCO attitude toward John Wayne movies was that "They're a lot of bullshit."
I recommend you find a copy of "Fire in the Lake" and read it. It will open your eyes to the real history and complicated politics of that particular war than anything else I can think of. I also recommend John Steinbeck III paperback book "Being Here" and Gustav Hasford's novel "The Short Timers" (which Stanley Kubrick filmed under the titles "Full Metal Jacket.")
