Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [88]
Knowing that his going to Vietnam would worry his wife, Eisner was less than forthcoming when he outlined his plans. He told Ann that he was going to Japan—which was true enough: he was going to Japan in the early part of his trip—but he said nothing about Vietnam. Ann boiled over when she heard from him after he reached the country.
“He lied to me about Vietnam,” she recalled. “When he got there and told me he was in Vietnam, I was so mad. I said, ‘Just wait until you get home …’”
Saigon, the destination for the first leg of Eisner’s visit to Vietnam, while safe, had an almost surreal quality to it. These were the days before the Tet Offensive, when the American troop presence still secured much of South Vietnam and the fighting was far enough away from Saigon to give the people in the city a feeling of safety. Eisner had never witnessed any heavy fighting when he traveled to Korea, but there was never a question of combat preparedness or of GIs being aware that fighting could break out at a moment’s notice. It was different in Vietnam.
“Saigon was like a stage set,” Eisner said. “U.S. soldiers dwarfed the native Vietnamese. Correspondents drank at the sidewalk cafés. Hotels were encased in wire screens to protect them from the occasional bomb-throwing civilian. The remnant of a French law office held hundreds of files belonging to plantation owners who had fled the country a decade before. Because the city was under military control, it all seemed relatively benign.”
All that changed when Eisner went out in the field, to the Mekong Delta, accompanied by a young officer at the tail end of his duty in-country. As Eisner would recall in the title story of Last Day in Vietnam, the major was edgy about being anywhere near a combat zone when he was about to be shipped home, and it only got worse when fighting broke out shortly after their helicopter landed. Eisner suddenly found himself in the middle of the war, with shells exploding all around him. He made a beeline to a helicopter, jumped in, and was whisked away, safe but shaken. The experience fortified his belief that he was performing a service with his work with P*S, but it was unnerving for someone who had spent his own years in the service tucked away in an office in Washington, D.C.
Throughout his stay in Vietnam, Eisner took notes and photographs, made sketches, and filed away impressions that he couldn’t use with P*S, but that three decades later would become part of Last Day in Vietnam. Before departing for Southeast Asia, Eisner had believed that the U.S. military would win the day in Vietnam. After seeing the war firsthand and witnessing the troops’ morale, he feared that this was a war that could not be won.
By all appearances, Eisner’s quiet suburban life away from work was designed by a man determined to avoid a repetition of his own childhood. White Plains, a short train ride from Manhattan, boasted tree-lined streets, one-family frame houses, good schools, and a feeling of order that was missing in the rushed foot traffic, honking cars, and twenty-four-hour neon lights of the city. Eisner loved both—the city and the suburb—but his wife was happy to escape the city of her youth and provide as idyllic a life as possible for their two children. Eisner reveled in New York’s energy, but he too was determined to see that his kids would never experience a hint of the life he’d known while he was growing up in the tenements.
According to Ann Eisner, this focus on providing for his family was the precise reason he had abandoned his career as a comic book writer and artist and picked up a far less exciting but more stable life of working on P*S and creating instructional and industrial comics. “He had a wife and children he was supporting,” she stated, stressing that he quit work