Mauldin’s Back in the Trenches Again

Gen. George S. Patton hated Willie and Joe for their slouch and stubble, their combat weariness and dull eyes that held no fire for further battle.

He ordered Army cartoonist Sgt. William Mauldin to clean up his characters. Or “Stars and Stripes,” Willie and Joe’s World War II platform, would be banned from Patton’s operational area.

Fortunately for Mauldin, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower understood Willie and Joe. Ike outranked Patton. So Willie and Joe served out the war, Mauldin won a Pulitzer Prize for his war cartooning and all three GIs found immortality.

Mauldin went to Korea, but drew without Willie and Joe. Then Vietnam. Now, after a recent visit with troops in Saudi Arabia, Mauldin is cartooning his fourth war.

“Frankly, I think all wars are alike,” he says. “Some wars I approve of and, although I’m not a pacifist, some wars I do not approve of. And I most emphatically do not approve of this one.

“The oil connection is obvious. The Bush connection to oil is obvious. Good God, he’s an old wildcatter from Midland, Tex. There’s a connection somewhere . . . and I’ve been very rough on Bush throughout this thing.”

Mauldin now lives in Santa Fe, N.M. He draws only three cartoons a week because his hand hurts. Even without arthritis, he says, “it’s much more fun to do three a week than five, I’ll tell you for sure.”

Since Jan. 17, the front-line fire horse in Mauldin has stirred and “this stupid business in the Persian Gulf has got me fired up.”

Mauldin remains passionately attached to his beloved grunts, “those poor bastards . . . volunteers for the same reason I joined the National Guard back in 1940, 18 months before Pearl Harbor. It meant a free suit of clothes, three meals a day and a free pair of shoes.” Today’s enlistees, he says, are just as poor, just as disadvantaged and they enlisted “for economic reasons . . . but they also did it for patriotic reasons. So, my heart is with them. Completely.”

And is there a new legion of strong, implacable, dour Willie and Joes among the 450,000 Americans attending Desert Storm?

“I don’t know,” Mauldin replies. “Remember, the (ground) war isn’t on yet. We don’t know how they’re going to react. My suspicion is they are going to react very well indeed.

“They are a very high-caliber, high-quality kids and I identify with them totally. As a matter of fact, they’re a helluva lot smarter than I was.”

Mauldin continues to draw war through the eyes of two infantryman. They are digging into the sand. Says one: “Nobody can call George Bush a wimp again.” Says the other: “Thank God. I guess it’s all been worth it, then.”

Same soldiers, same foxhole. Says one: “Saddam keeps threatenin’ us with chemical warfare.” Says the other: “All he’s gotta do is get upwind and burn some tires.”

But Willie and Joe, Mauldin says, have retired from the military. They will not be recalled for service in the Persian Gulf:

“Oh, no. They have a certain place in time and belong in a certain corner of history. I think there is nothing more futile than trying to extend something that worked very well once, in wartime.”

There will be another absentee from the Gulf fighting: Pvt. Beetle Bailey.

Mort Walker, creator of the 40-year-old comic strip of life on a stateside military post, says he has made oblique references to Desert Storm while drawing Beetle Bailey.

“I thought a lot about it during the Korean War and the Vietnam War and rejected it both times,” says Walker, whose strip now appears in 1,800 newspapers. “It’s hard to be funny about war.

“And my kind of gentle, loving humor doesn’t quite fit the bitter reality of this war.”