The Other Side
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Cameron Stewart
Vertigo
Before his epic runs on Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and Scalped, Jason Aaron was still a pipsqueak who just broke into the comics industry after submitting an 8-page story to Marvel. For him to give us The Other Side straight out of the gate is a bold and astounding move for a man who dares to run instead of crawl. Everyone knows about the atrocities that happened during the Vietnam War, but it seems that Aaron is one of the few who tackles the subject of what the other side was also going through. While it wasn’t easy for the United States, it was a hundred times worse for the Vietcong.
We get the tale of two farm boys, each from a different part of the world, and how they arrive during the height of the Vietnam War in 1968. Bill Everette is from Alabama, and Vo Binh Dai is from northern Vietnam. While Dai proudly volunteered to fight for the People’s Army of Vietnam, Everette like many other young men at the time, was drafted. Everette tries every trick in the book to keep from being shipped-off (e.g. tries to catch V.D., openly states he’s a homosexual), but Uncle Sam needs men and he just has to bite the bullet and go fight for his country.
While training, we see the classic drill sergeant archetype from Full Metal Jacket making Everette’s life a living hell. It doesn’t help that during all the stress he’s enduring, he’s starting to see ghosts of corpses from the war. Also, his gun starts talking to him. Upon informing the chaplain of what he’s seeing, in hopes he’ll be deemed unfit for duty, he’s told to suck it up and get ready to go fight overseas.
Everette goes by plane, while Dai goes the way of train, then a long march through the jungles to the frontlines of the war. Dai is very patriotic, and believes that great honor is to be achieved by dying protecting his country from the savage Americans. However, upon seeing the rest of his country for the first time, it seems that perhaps it’s not as glorious as he once thought, as he bears witness to truly unspeakable acts.
Throughout the war, both men are affected by the horrors of the battlefield, and some things just cannot be unseen. Stewart and Aaron do an good job showing how Bill and Vo react to such gruesome scenarios, that it’s no surprise that one of them isn’t coming back home afterwards.
From tigers dragging away corpses to napalm destroying entire villages, Cameron Stewart does an amazing job on art. The reason everything looks so great is because he toured Vietnam for two weeks to get in the mindset for this series, and it definitely can be seen on every page. The hordes of undead soldiers who follow Everette throughout has to be my favorite bits by Stewart, because each corpse looks mangled worse than the one before it. How many other artists can you think of who actually got off their ass to travel to another country to get the genuine feel for an upcoming story?
As for Jason Aaron, he makes it feel authentic by an entirely different connection; his cousin is Gustav Hasford, the Vietnam veteran and author of The Short-Timers which was later adapted to the movie Full Metal Jacket. Aaron got to know his cousin and his cousin’s friends, and you can read and understand their struggles in precise details.
So while The Other Side originally came out a few years ago, it’s Jason Aaron’s first real hit, and was even up for an Eisner. I bring this up because he’s one of the hottest writers today, and it’s always fun to see where they started, and see how much they’ve accomplished since then. Do yourself a favor and pick up The Other Side, then go shoot yourself some Victor Charlie.
