The Dying Truth
The word, “bravery, only appears once in all of Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back, and it is in the introduction by Tom Brokaw.
“Afraid,” however, shows up a dozen times, including, “It is natural to be afraid.”
That piece of the text runs: “It is natural to be afraid. We all are. But no soldier can let his fear govern his conduct to such a degree. Is that understood? Yessir.”
That yessir is rhetorical.
And, ain’t we all.
Weapon X, by Larry Hama and Adam Kubert, with assists by divers hands, is a story set within the time frame and world of Marvel Comics’ Age of Apocalypse, an alternate late 1990s in which the world was conquered by genocidal sadist mutants and their normative human collaborators.
Weapon X is a war story about being on the more hazardous side of enemy lines at all times. It is a comic about war profiteers, self-mutilation, selling out, academic dehumanization, what could have beens, and suicidal optimists.
Larry Hama, who wrote the first meeting of Wolverine and Deadpool in comics but is oddly not credited in the current Deadpool and Wolverine movie in any respect, has discussed, before, his technique of writing by creating scenarios and then working out along with the characters how it will proceed. With Weapon X he would have needed to know the end results and to have some beats to parallel them with other comics taking place during the same timeframe, but there is a palpable sense of causal wake, too, of feet on the ground and situations treated as real.
The overall plot of the comic is that Wolverine is couriering for the surviving human entrenchment out of Western Europe, so that they can effect a genocidal attack on North America via giant killer robots, called Sentinels. The backbone, as it develops, is one of the soldier as weapon and weapon as fodder, which involves ranking officers mutilated and patched back up, grunts sent to die, murderbots, soldiers who are enhanced with bionics and prostheses, suicidal ennui that comes in waves across individuals and whole factions, camps of political prisoners and chattel humanity used as firing practice or for sadism and lust, and the occasional view from where the highest up stand; the rich and powerful leaders with their windows on airborne pavilions and glamorous towers.
The rich suffer, too, and much of the most famous trench poetry is from the generationally-wealthy, but well, there are reasons why theirs survives and is promoted.
While the likes of Logan, the eponymous Weapon X, or his colleagues, Jean Grey, Yashida Mariko, Gateway or Carol Danvers want to believe in bosses and industrialists, they all acknowledge shots are called by potential war profiteers, because the business is war. When this proves correct (with duress), it is neither shocking nor reassuring.
The tradition of Logan, of Wolverine, is that he is a mutant who is also enhanced mechanically, a man made a weapon, stripped of much of his memory, and stripped again whenever it is deemed useful to his betters, or, if you would prefer, his bosses.
It is a state of eternal hopelessness and hope. A holding pattern that ever-changes.
Jean Grey tries to commit suicide via Logan. Carol kills herself protecting Logan. Logan consistently puts himself into potentially suicidal situations. Various barely-named or nameless combatants fling themselves into death’s way throughout the comic, and every time, barely any ground, physical or moral, is especially gained.
The inversion of Gateway from a potbellied breechclout unspeaking mystic with dwarfism to a tv-watching, chains-smoking (what seems to be probably not tobacco) man of normative height who talks a minute a mile and was treated to the unpleasant Ishi experience at University of California, Berkeley, is not wholly explained, but makes the satire of Weapon X (and across many of the Age of Apocalypse stories) shine with a reflective light.
From Logan and Carol to Jean and Gateway, even with the enemy combatants, or babies and children in camps and labs, this is a intermixture of stories and every story is one of the making of people into machines and making those machines go out to die for the glory or survival of one encampment or another.
