Slightly More Than…

NOTE: this post comes with a giant content warning. I’d say trigger warning, but it might be triggering.

How many enemy combatants did the average US soldier kill in WWII?

It’s a question that came to be this morning as I was thinking about a story. And in a way, it influenced Blood Orange.

When I started writing Blood Orange, a crime comic book featuring a contemporary female protagonist, neither artist and co-creator Paul Fricke nor I wanted to ape current trends in fiction, especially fiction that portrays characters with male attributes and fantasies “reskinned” in the form of a woman.

And in particular, I wanted to write a story I felt reflected the primary conflicts that occur in the modern, Western world — where violence is primarily social and economic. Few of us will ever face an armed assailant. Almost all of us face people who use social power in ways that are equally devastating and most deal with a skyrocketing cost of living, underemployment, and marginalization based on class.

Making such a story interesting (apart from dynamic comic art), of course, challenges nearly whole course of popular fiction. Blood Orange is not a serious drama, which is where you see most soft conflicts. But when have you ever seen violence on the scale of most movies — action, crime, horror, sci-fi, or even war? Which brings us back to the original question.

How many enemy combatants did the average US soldier kill in WWII?

If you watch even the most accurate programs or movies about World War II, or video game gameplay videos on YouTube like I did last night, you might be inclined to say the average infantryman killed a dozen or more German or Japanese soldiers. But a quick review of Internet sources reveals a far different story.

How many enemy combatants did the average US soldier kill in WWII?

Slightly more than zero. A mere step over the x-axis from none at all.

Modern warfare is designed around weapons that can devastate an enemy — outright killing or crippling the foe to preserve the maximum number of lives on one’s own side. In World War I, I once heard, there were more bayonet casualties than ones from rifles. Now, casualties and kills are different, but still, when soldiers in WWII were killed, artillery fire and bombing, not infantry it seems, was more often the cause.

This calls the entertainment value of our modern fantasies, be they in action movies or comics, into question. If even in war, death by one-on-one conflict is statistically rare outside underdeveloped countries, then it makes our action heroes, as cathartic as their actions may be, and as much as their antagonists may deserve it plot wise, much more akin to modern spree killers than valiant fighters of the Greatest Generation. It also cheapens the horror of armed conflicts that still go on in parts of the world where people may be subject to brutalities like the Rwandan Genocide, where hundreds of thousands were killed, often with machetes.

And while the raised pick-em-up truck crowd in America with their “Molon Labe” stickers cosplay violent, divisive messages put out even by filmmakers as noteworthy as Alex Garland, it’s just that. Perverse pantomime.

On my daily walk through my little adopted hometown, there’s an increase in the number of unhoused people in Veterans Park. Every one of these folks has a family, bridges burned, and a back story of how they came to this point in their lives. I have often uttered, with understanding, the phrase “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” As people of conscience, it’s a realization  we must all come to ourselves. But as I walk the small streets of this town, I sometimes verbalize the traumas of the callousness and cruelty I’ve experienced that partly brought me to my place in the world. If my clothes were a little older and ill fitting, my hair less frequently cut, what would distinguish me, during these jags of talking to myself, from my neighbors who live on these streets?

As suspense builds in “Blood Orange” to the coming conflict between minor celebrity Cat Henley and the Russian mob, there are no faceless victims or perpetrators. Neither the rage nor hopelessness we experience can be solved with a cinematic spray of lead. Victory is only recognized in the ability to identify and act on opportunity — and only the degree to which we pursue these opportunities ethically contributes to the separation between hero and villain.

How much ethos must one exercise to stay right of the x-axis?

Slightly more than zero.