Drafted - Rick Parker
The Vietnam War has generated no shortage of memoirs, but Rick Parker's graphic memoir stands apart because it isn't really a war memoir at all. Instead, it's a diary about waiting for war, fearing war, and trying to survive the absurdities of military life while hoping not to be sent into combat. Parker, a shy and artistically inclined young man who isn't particularly good in school, is drafted into the Army in 1966. Unlike in many Vietnam narratives, he never actually serves overseas. The threat of deployment looms its head every now and then, but the book's focus is on boot camp, officer training, military bureaucracy, and the strange, often ridiculous routines of Army life. Parker discovers quickly that he is profoundly unsuited to military culture and spends much of the book trying to endure it rather than embrace it. It's a fairly sanitized account. The only violence comes from two candidates who die in car wrecks, and sex mostly presents itself in the form of a couple of women who flirt with Parker, who awkward and (at first) doesn't reciprocate.
Parker doesn't reinvent himself as a hero, nor does he present military service as a grand coming-of-age journey. If anything, Parker is too taciturn — there's very little introspection, regret, or sizing himself up. Perhaps that's just a tendency of his generation; his parents drop him off at the recruiting office (with war a very real specter) with far less anxiety or emotion than parents today drop their kids off at summer camp. The memoir's most memorable scenes often involve mundane frustrations, arbitrary authority, and the constant low-grade fear produced by the draft itself. Parker is similarly silent on the social and racial issues of the day. The cartooning is expressive and accessible, leaning toward caricature rather than realism. His storytelling often recalls the autobiographical comics of Harvey Pekar: anecdotal, conversational, and more interested in lived experience than dramatic plotting. [3.5]
