Broken Frontier

WAR-FIX.  David Axe, writer.  Steven Olexa, artist.  NBM Publishing, Inc., 2006.

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…
- Deuteronomy 30:19

We must guard against the myth of war and the drug of war that can, together, render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle.
- Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Into a milieu of war, in desperate need of solutions, comes David Axe’s WAR-FIX.  Axe, a reporter who has been to Iraq seven times, compares his addiction to war to the addiction of a heroin addict.  The story is about as interesting as a story of an addict’s efforts to score might be.  The addict gets his fix, and remains addicted.  Nothing really changes, nor is the reader given any reason to believe that the addict will ever change.  Axe warns that he will continue to score until the addiction kills him.  It is a confession that tells us what we urgently need to know: war correspondents are part of the problem.  Seekers of solutions to the Iraq war will do well to heed the lesson.  We need a healthy dose of skepticism when we listen to the press.

What makes WAR-FIX unforgettable on the landscape of graphic novels is the masterful art of Steven Olexa.  Olexa, a superb draftsman, shuns traditional sequential panels in favor of montage, composite pictures made by combining several separate pictures.  This creates an effect much like a crowded photo album.  He also uses perspective in ways that play against chronological time.  The result is powerful, as his densely complex pages communicate multiple stories and themes, and evoke the emotional intensity of the characters and their suffering.  The effect of his approach to illustration is fluid, even musical, if not melodic.  The novel seems to not have chapters so much as movements.  This is not a symphony, however.  Axe has written something far too personal and intimate, and Olexa deftly composes a piece more appropriate to a chamber ensemble.

Axe is at his finest when documenting the people he meets.  Together, Axe and Olexa are brilliant at communicating a whole character with only a few words and images.  Meet Bhim, the Nepalese contractor who befriends Axe in the Green Zone.  Bhim tells Axe that he makes more money in Iraq than some Nepalese make in a lifetime.  Bhim is shown talking to Axe over a cup of coffee, and the simple act of drinking a cup of coffee accentuates his pragmatism, and his perfectly common wish to prosper.  Yet the chopper overhead accentuates the risk Bhim takes.  Or meet the American soldier who tells Axe in just a few short statements about the day he couldn’t save five men from drowning in their tank after it rolled into a canal.  We don’t see the soldier’s face.  We see his hands, and they tell the story. 

His hands elevated, anxious, he says, “I jumped in the water to save them, but the mud was too deep.”  Hands in his lap, as if lost in reverie, he says, “It was so cold…I could hear them screaming…”  Hands clutching his pants legs, anguished, he says, “Oh Jesus.” 

Olexa and Axe make the people in Iraq – Iraqi nationals, soldiers, press, and contractors – feel very real.  Their humanity and individuality seep off the page and into the reader’s memory.  But the wordless pages of the novel are the pinnacle of the collaboration between the two, documenting the more irrational of Axe’s moments, like anticipation, nightmares, fear, and violence. 

A wordless two-page spread is positioned at nearly the halfway point of the novel, at the moment when Axe approaches Baghdad for the first time.  Axe is flying with his military escort from Kuwait to Iraq.  On the two pages, we see Axe and some soldiers inside the transport plane.  One soldier yawns.  We see the plane flying over Iraq, Baghdad below.  We also see plane from the ground.  An Iraqi woman looks up to the sky, her animals nearby.  An American military patrol seems not to notice the plane.  Children, playing in a burned-out tank, look up.  And in a dark place behind all of this, one man tortures another.  The torturer has paused, and also looks up, as though he hears the plane.  The man he tortures continues to cry in pain and fear.  Layers of daily life in Iraq, some ordinary, some tragic, and some gruesome, are layered upon each other while Axe’s plane is arriving.  The sense of tension and expectation fills the pages, and is quickly blown away, quite literally, when the page is turned.

David Axe and Steven Olexa demythologize and humanize the war through Axe’s honesty about himself and his motivations, and through Olexa’s superb artistic talent.  Perhaps because Axe is so upfront about his addiction, we are made less susceptible to the drug of war.  But he leaves us with little to believe in, except his own inevitable death, and the persistence of war.  It is not only possible, but necessary, that we choose life, and we need to hear from those who have made that choice.  We have too many dead already, and we don’t want to add the name of David Axe to the list of those lost and lamented. 

If you want to understand the problem, read WAR-FIX.  If you're looking for solutions, then just say no.