Review: 'The White Donkey'

 "I hope you find what you're looking for..."

I never really followed the Terminal Lance comics while I was in the Marines. Being a Sergeant when it came out, it seemed to me like following it would give the impression that I wanted to be a Lance Corporal again. Once I left the Marines, though, it was a different story. Maximilian Uriarte paints life in the Marine Corps with a brutally honest brush, showing how the chain of command looks from the bottom up. When I heard about this book, The White Donkey, I knew I would have to read it.

The White Donkey tells the story of a young Marine named Abe's first deployment to Iraq, in 2007. The story begins with pre-deployment training at his home station, followed by a Mojave Viper exercise in Twentynine Palms, California, then a couple of weeks of leave, and finally, the actual deployment and the subsequent homecoming. Anyone who has served in the military knows the drill, and I thought the book would be predictable in that aspect, but I was wrong. The book surpassed my expectations in every category.

Reading a graphic novel, to me, should be like watching a movie. Unlike the screenwriter of a movie, however, the author of a graphic novel must supply the sound. The first thing I noticed about this book was that the onomatopoeia was spot-on. Uriarte accurately captured the sounds of everything, from the drone of a HMMWV engine, to the almost ever-present automatic weapons fire in the distance, even the sound of an entire battalion coming to the position of attention. The tone and feel of the story was also exactly how I remembered Iraq. The air-conditioned sleeping quarters and the plethora of food choices in the DFACs felt out-of-place, compared with what I had expected of a war zone.

Without giving too much of the story away, it's hard to accurately describe the feelings portrayed in the book. The part dealing with returning from the deployment, though, was what resonated the deepest for me. Contrary to popular belief, the military doesn't just dump its members back on their doorsteps after serving in a combat zone. There is a process to the reintegration. There are meetings, there are checklists to fill out, there are questionnaires to answer. However, as shown in the book, the Marines returning from the deployment don't want to deal with the process. They want to get home and take their leave, and escape the unit as quickly as possible. After months on end of being around the same people, they want to get away. They want to be left alone to decompress and deal with the experience in their own ways.

Unfortunately, for many, that means relying on alcohol or other drugs to cope. The support system that the military offers is ignored, because nobody wants to be "That Guy." That Guy who couldn't handle it. That Guy who wimped out and talked to the chaplain. There is a stigma associated with asking for help. This is your rifle, this is your pack, this is your equipment, this is your responsibility. Even in a team environment, personal responsibility is stressed, and nobody wants to be the weak link who can't pull his own weight.

Even without having personally gone through the sequence of events portrayed, The White Donkey is easy to relate to. It's impossible not to relate to, really. I was a POG in the Air Wing. I only spent two months in Iraq, and never went outside the wire. In reality, the only thing I have in common with the characters in the story is the "U.S. MARINES" on the left side of the uniform I wore. But, regardless of the individual experiences in-theater, I think everyone who has deployed can relate to the homecoming process. How everyone thanks you, and you feel guilty because you don't think you did anything. How you get sick of hearing the same questions over and over, but you try to be polite about it. How you can't relate to people your own age, because you've been to a part of the world they've only heard about on the news.

I would recommend this book to anybody. Veteran or not, regardless of your position on war or the military in general, regardless of whether you read for recreation or not, I think everyone can get something from this book. Maximilian Uriarte has done a hell of a job with The White Donkey, and deserves the success it has found. I can't wait for the movie, which will undoubtedly be coming. Just don't let M. Night Shyalaman anywhere near it...