Plucked from his workaday youth as an Irish-American kid from Brooklyn, Ryan’s military deployment to Vietnam begins in 1966 with shiftless excursions into women, booze, and reefer. As he wades ever deeper north, his cavorting is replaced by an unceasing violence. The amorality of war, and specifically this war, is laid bare. Eve Gilbert’s nakedly primitive drawing perfectly reflects Ryan’s own naivete, filled to the brim with acerbic commentary and pitch-black humor. Images overflow with blood and dissidence, dripping with rage for the injustice done to the young men made grist for the war machine. Ultimately, My Year in Vietnam is a story of triumph and humanity, of men rising against their country’s worst impulses. Ryan’s greatest act of resistance becomes his life, proving that the men who fought these wars can be more than weapons and fodder, but activists and paragons and fathers and grandfathers; thinking, feeling, beating hearts.
