yong : book 9/25 : The Brass Ring by Bill Mauldin

Bill Mauldin? Who the hell is Bill Mauldin? No, you may have never heard the name before. But you've probably seen it. Just like in this picture, hand-printed in all caps, in the bottom corner of a political cartoon. The man passed away in 2003, but not before winning two Pulitzer Prizes, the first while he was just a floppy-eared kid serving his country in World War II, speaking up for the grunts in the trenches with his scruffy characters Willy and Joe, and pissing off the likes of General George S. Patton himself. I've been on a memoir kick lately, and this is Mauldin's memoir of his experience in the war. I'd been looking for this book for several years now, and finally ended up buying it through Amazon, in the process discovering a whole underground trade in discarded library books.

This particular worn copy once belonged to the public library of Coin, Iowa. It's still got the pocket for the checkout card inside the front cover. You can find a whole slew of books like this being sold on Amazon for the nominal price of $0.01, plus $3.49 in shipping and handling. After $2.07 for postage, maybe sixty cents for the bubble wrap mailer...they can't be making more than seventy cents per book. But thanks to the internet and economies of quantity, some people are managing to make a buck this way.

It's not the most horrific, up-close account of war. Mauldin managed to weasel himself a relative safe job as reporter for his division's newspaper, and this mostly kept him out of direct combat. He did receive a Purple Heart, but it was for a ridiculous little scratch that he felt compelled to lampoon in his own cartoon. But he's a laid-back, straight-shootin', dirt-poor country kid with a pretty unwavering idea of right and wrong, and it shows in his cartoons, and it shows in his writing. This one is probably his most famous cartoon, published the day after John F. Kennedy was shot.

Back when I took AP US History in high school, we skipped all the wars. I think they weren't going to be on the test or something. We covered everything leading up to them, and their aftermaths, but nothing about the wars themselves. As a result, I've always felt a little lacking, always wanted to know about the Battle of the Bulge, or the 442nd Japanese-American regiment, or the Russian-German epic devouring/hurling at each other/wanton waste of human lives. Having seen the war through Mauldin's eyes, I feel a little less clueless, a little more personally connected. And that Patton fellow sure was a right wanker.