American Vampire #14

"Ghost War," Part Two
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Surviving war demands operating under the most suitable perspective.  Henry Preston's right:  "Maybe it was a good thing, though--good that all we could see was the mission that morning.  God forbid you take the time to step back and see things for what they are in a place like that" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 56 [American Vampire #14: 4]).  Soldiers require a little myopia to be able to keep going, to willingly fail to see their own circumstances with complete clarity.  It's also undoubtedly an indictment of war itself that it necessitates this kind of shortsightedness as it depends on a wider scope to make it justifiable in the least.

It's also a liability, however, the inability to see the vampires for the trees, I suppose.  The Pacific theater is often overlooked in history's imagination of World War II in favor of the battlefronts on the European continent.  For all the atrocities committed under Nazi rule, German warfare was for most American troops familiar if horrible.  Combat in the Pacific against Japanese imperial troops was less so.  The powerful ethos developing out of late-19th-century militarism dictated cultural behaviors that prevented surrender and glorified self-sacrifice, the unwavering dedication and subordination of the individual to the state, one that kept some soldiers in their foxholes defending islands years after armistice was struck.  Additionally, racial differences—perceived as strongly by Allied as Imperial troops, by the VMS's "dead" soldiers as any vampire—encouraged a dehumanizing attitude.  When Preston and his platoon arrive in Taipan looking for humanoid vampires only to find wild, inhuman ones crouching in trees awaiting a guerrilla-style attack on their would-be exterminators, the echoes are there.

"Ghost War" is about being a soldier at war, the sacrifices one makes for the ones back home and sacrificing the ones back home.  Skinner Sweet and Pearl Preston (née Jones) are, as always, the wild cards.  Sweet's as self-serving as any; Hobbes is right about that.  But just what his stakes are in Taipan are unclear, since he would, of course, be the type to avoid a war zone.  And Pearl would do anything, including striking a tenuous alliance with Hobbes and the VMS, to save Henry, but she's equally as capable of killing them all to accomplish the same.

[June 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334)