Rick Parker's Drafted:
A Darkly Humorous Memoir in Words and Pictures

BY MARC LEEPSON

As a kid growing up in Savannah, Georgia, in the fifties and sixties, Rickie Parker was enthralled by newspaper comic strips. So much so, he later wrote, that he knew “it was just a matter of time before someone did a comic strip about me.”

It took more than a few decades, but that belief basically came true last year with Parker’s graphic memoir, Drafted (Abrams Books, 256 pp. $24.99, hardcover; $11.99, Kindle), an offbeat, clever, often slyly humorous gem that centers on Parker’s brief but event-filled military career.

A much-heralded artist, writer, and cartoonist, Rick Parker is best known for his work as the artist on MTV’s 28 Beavis and Butt-Head comic books. He also spent fifteen years at Marvel Comics doing lettering and production work on Spider Man, Iron Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Star Wars, and many other comic books.

Parker’s short military career began inauspiciously after he was drafted into the Army at 19 in 1966 a few months after flunking out of college. His book is chock-full of engaging words-and-picture depictions of what millions of us who entered military service during the Vietnam War went through: the induction center, basic training, AIT, and then, in Parker’s case, OCS and an assignment to a Pershing (Nuclear) Missile Detachment at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Parker landed at White Sands after a series of ups and downs during training. When he did, it dawned on the young LT that, as he put it, he “was not cut out for the Army.”

There were plenty of other hints along the way. That includes getting assigned just prior to OCS as an acting jack buck sergeant in charge of a Holdover Platoon for a couple of weeks. Said platoon, as Parker notes, was “comprised of a motley assortment of individuals deemed unfit for military service for one reason or another” who were “awaiting orders to be mustered out of the service and released back into an unsuspecting civilian population.”

Parker’s five-page depiction of that experience brilliantly illuminates that weird, thankless job. The same is true with other set pieces in the book, including his nightmarish time going through the escape-and-evasion course at Fort Sill, complete with a simulated POW camp and torturous interrogations; the ridiculously chickenshit hazing of OCS trainees, especially at mealtimes; Parker’s sardonic take on his first “art show” at the rudimentary White Sands Officers Club (a tent), which consisted of three “dirty pictures” done in pastels, despite the fact that—as he sheepishly writes—he “had never seen a naked woman; only a picture of one in a magazine”; and an emotionally harrowing stint directing military funerals for servicemembers who lost their lives in Vietnam and elsewhere overseas.

Parker signed up for OCS, he says, “not out of any sense of duty or patriotism, but out of self-preservation.” He thought that, if he went to the warzone as an artillery officer, his “chances of survival would be enhanced.” But during OCS, after Parker “shamefully confessed” that to one of his fellow trainees, the guy set him straight.

“It’s actually quite the opposite,” his fellow trainee said. “Forward observers have one of the highest casualty rates among all our troops in the field.” That news, Parker says, “instead of alarming me, made feel somewhat better and actually relieved my guilty conscience.”

As it turned out, even though two-thirds of the guys in his OCS graduating class received orders for Vietnam or to units about to deploy there, Parker underwent eight more weeks of training in guided missiles and spent the rest of his enlistment at White Sands.

Despite his rocky three years, one month, and five days of military service, Parker says that going through all of those “highly intense shared experiences with others” had a profound influence on his life. Doing so, he says, “especially when being pushed to the limit, I began to learn more about myself, and my fellow human beings.”

Drafted, Parker tells us, is the first “work of any significance” during his fifty-year artistic career that he both illustrated and wrote. Here’s hoping it’s not his last.

The prolific author Ray Boomhower has written biographies of three notable war correspondents: Richard Tregaskis, Ernie Pyle, and Robert Sherrod. Boomhower tells another enlightening story of a war correspondent in his latest book, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph that Stunned the World (University of New Mexico Press, 344 pp. $34.95, hardcover and e-book), which came out last March.

This well-researched, well-written slice-of-life biography focuses on Browne’s pioneering coverage of the Vietnam War, with an emphasis on what happened on June 11, 1963, when he took one of the most famous and impactful photographs of the war. That would be the widely reproduced image of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in the middle of a Saigon street, which indeed was the ultimate protest, in this case against the anti-Buddhist practices of South Vietnamese President Ngô Ðình Diem.

Browne, who received a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work in Vietnam after becoming the Associated Press’ Saigon Bureau Chief, had been working in-country since 1961. He had been drafted into the Army and served in Korea just after the war. A dedicated, prolific reporter who often made his way out to the field to gather information, Browne was “overshadowed,” as Boomhower notes, after the war by the accomplishments and fame of fellow correspondents David (The Best and the Brightest) Halberstam, Neil (A Bright, Shining Lie) Sheehan, and future CNN star reporter Peter Arnett.

Ray Boomhower makes a convincing case that the self-effacing Brown was “one of the preeminent journalists” of the Vietnam War. Few other correspondents, he notes, “except for his AP colleague Arnett, could match his knowledge about the conflict and his commitment to uncovering the truth in a country in which lies and obfuscation were the norm, and in a war fought by both sides with ‘lies and counter lies.’”

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