About book Unknown Soldier, Vol. 1: Haunted House (2009)
Dr.Lwanga a native to Uganda has been givien a chance to go to America for a better future. But now Dr Lwanga has gone back to Uganda to help the war torn villages and help children but when appon ariving at Unganda he simply becomes violent and has violent dreams.An indecent acurrs and now Dr Lwanga is missing and the Unknown soldier has awoken. If someone was to read a book like this they would have to be mautuer about it becuase this book shows violence and death and to mostly child soldiers.but this book i would recomend. A comic about child soldiers in Uganda.Unknown Soldier by Joshua Dysart is a 25 issue-long reboot of the 1970’s DC war comic by the same name, which focused upon a North American World War Two soldier, his face obscured by bandages, waging a one man war against Japanese and German soldiers, culminating in the killing of Hitler. The 2008 version of this comic transplants these character ideas (mask, obfuscated identity, one man army) to Uganda, where a new soldier declares war on Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. The story is set in 2002, during a massive military offensive in which the armed forces of Uganda (the Ugandan People’s Defense Force) attacked Sudanese LRA bases. This resulted in LRA retaliating by attacking refugee camps in Uganda and Sudan, massacring hundreds of people and abducting many others; the abducted boys to be used as soldiers, the girls as ‘soldiers' wives’ – sex slaves. What follows is an unflinchingly violent narrative which explores such real life atrocities, along with issues of witch hunts, internally displaced people, land mines, political corruption, and the international exploitation of Africa. ‘The moral complications of a war fought against children’ remain the issue at the centre of this comic, as it continually asks how one can fight again an army of abducted, manipulated children. Unfortunately, the solution the comic provides is, all too often, kill them. The first volume is awash with child death, and although the protagonist later swears off intentionally killing children and innocents, deaths still occur as a result of his otherwise uncompromising actions. The book eventually arguably presents this non-murderous ideological change as an Achilles’ heel, then closes with the message it wants to bequeath to its readers: that it is better to die (and to kill) for peace than it is to tolerate ongoing war. That’s what this story is at its heart: a let’s-hunt-and-kill-Joesph-Kony revenge fantasy, one which seeks to solve violence through violence. A comic like this could have easily fallen into the realm of Frank Miller-esque propaganda, but, to its credit, it is far smarter and more complex than such simplifications. The author, Dysart, spent a month in Northern Uganda and its IDP camps, and his experience and research invest the comic with an aura of authenticity. His essays which accompany the trade paper backs are insightful, and one issue in particular, told from the perspective of a gun as it is manufactured, first brought to Africa, and how it exchanges owners over bloody decades of turmoil, shows great understanding of the history of conflict in the region. There’s also a degree of self-aware unease present in this comic in relation to having a North American author writing a book about a former North American soldier attempting to solve Africa’s problems. The comic seems somewhat uncomfortable with its own jingoism. On one hand, it’s hauling the USA over the coals for being involved in the exploitation of African politics and resources. It attacks Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, for having ‘strong ties to the American evangelical movement have placed the U.S. Christian doctrine at the heart of Ugandan lawmaking’. It criticizes Western leaders for praising Museveni while he attempts to make himself president for life, arrests his opposition, and whilst he urges his people to be self-reliant whilst cutting state spending and privatising state enterprise. America, (the political and economic America at least) is complicit in Dysart’s representation of human exploitation and misery.On the other hand, the comic sometimes appears to embrace jingoism, with America, through its militant world policing ethos, seeming praised and its violence viewed through a lens of stability-ensuring humanitarianism. The Unknown Soldier of the past is painted as someone who ‘took on the horror, the moral complexity and the physical and existential atrocity of American hubris so that WWII would never happen again’ yet later came to view this attitude as having created his own concentration camp of those dead at his hands and his policies. The Unknown Soldier of the present is given the option to seemingly atone for this by becoming a humanitarian doctor, but rebels against this identity to embrace the ends-justify-the-means identity of the first soldier anyway. While a significant portion of the text is spent exploring the clashing nature of the humanitarian doctor and the ideological mercenary, the Unknown Soldier’s identity becomes, to a large degree, the ‘force of nature, beyond morality… absolutely necessary in a world as horrible as this’ which the first soldier was. Though the comic places some of the responsibility for the character’s violent identity on the American military for programming him this way, it never wholly embraces any non-violent solutions. Unknown Soldier ultimately settles on the idea that killing Joseph Kony will be an act of redemption from the violent acts it has perpetrated preceding it. It is a complex, engaging, well-researched comic, unafraid to approach a host of important, horrific issues, but it is also violent utilitarianism sometimes masquerading as humanitarianism.
Do You like book Unknown Soldier, Vol. 1: Haunted House (2009)?
Reread it and it's even better the second time. Heavy stuff.
—nat
uganda. the only solution is a gun. graphic and depressing
—lostatsea
Intense and disturbing. Definitely not light reading.
—RAYdiance
