Taking a Look at Unknown Soldier

Jesse | Sep 10, 2009

It’s an issue that has been broadcast through different mediums-documentaries, books, and a movie in production with some big Hollywood names.

But until early August, the over twenty year old conflict in Northern Uganda had yet to garner a comic book to its awareness ranks.

Written by Eisner Award nominated Joshua Dysart and illustrated by Italian artist Alberto Ponticelli, Unknown Soldiers deftly explores the Ugandan situation through the eyes of a Ugandan born but American educated doctor by the name of Dr.Lwanga Moses.Dysart visited the area for research in early 2007, a relatively peaceful time in the area’s history given the recent cease-fire between the Lord’s Resistance Army(LRA) and President Museveni’s Uganda’s People’s Defense Force(UPDF). There he saw the destruction wrought on the innocent people in the north by way of child abductions,brutal murders, and over a million internally displaced persons(IDPs).

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Since 1986, the LRA, headed by a rotten individual by the name of Joseph Kony, has violently advocated for an overthrow of the government and an instillment of an institution built on the Ted Commandments. They are responsibile for “recruiting” child soldiers by stealing them from their own homes in the night,and brutally “hazing” them by forcing the children to kill their remaining family members.Children,thought to be easily indoctrinated and impressionable, are forcefed such myths that by rubbing cooking oil on them during battle, God will protect them from enemy bullets.They are hunted and horrifically killed if they try to escape or defy their rebel leader’s orders, and girls are subject to rape and beatings from their soldier “husbands”. It’s a travesty that has orphaned countless children,ruined the lives and communities in the area, and has stolen the innocence of Uganda’s future.

Dr.Lwanga Moses, aptly named for the underlying freeing of his Ugandan brothers and sisters, begins his story in his childhood.His parents,fleeing an Idi Amin regime,go to America and eventually put him through Harvard Medical School. Wanting desperately to find his roots,Dr.Lwanga forsakes cushy private practice job offers and a white girlfriend for humanitarian work at the IDP camps of Uganda and an African woman by the name of Dr.Lwanga Sera in the year 2002.

But Dr.Moses’ feelings of helplessness in the face of the LRA’s misdeeds,manifested through incidents such as operating on a girl with amputated limbs by the rebels for simply riding a bicycle, drive out a violent,seemingly proactive side of him that had previously only emerged in dreams. Killing a rebel to save someone’s life and in a fit of unrestrained anger/self defense, Dr.Moses self-mutalates himself from the guilt to drown out violent voices that are seeping into his awakened state.

This killing is the catalyst for change in Dr.Moses’ life, and he can never go back to the peaceful doctor he once was.On a mission to protect the innocent(in this first issue,that’s in the form of orphaned girls and nuns targeted by the local LRA group), Dr.Moses struggles with reconciling his faith with the blood on his hands.But,as Muslim journalist Mr.Sengendo(also known as ‘Momolu’)points out to him,”someone has to sacrifice.Do horrible things.Commit to ending this once and for all by any means necessary.” And that’s the extreme nature of Soldiers, where a man has to kill “an army of demoralized children” in hopes of restoring stability to the region.

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And that’s only part of the reason Soldiers is so thought provoking.Supplied with rich context and history, the reader is simultaneously delving themselves into a comic book and learning about a part of the world Western society is usually only exposed to through celebrity pet projects(not to say that all celebrity charity work is a bad thing).In fact, Dysart gives the reader a diverse and amazingly complex cast of characters. There’s A-list American actress Margaret Wells, who reveals surprising depth and compassion in her televised visits to the country.But, as Dr.Moses points out to his wife, “she looks at [Uganda] and sees only genocide,child soldiers,AIDS,and famine.Her altruism borders on fetishism”. This grants some insight into how some Africans(and by extent, how other countries) might feel about what they see are intruding and patronizing Western nations.

Other characters have supporting and intersecting plotlines, most notably mysterious CIA agent Jack Lee Howl, whose history in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and his hunt for Dr.Moses have yet to be fully explained. Howl brings a touch of international politics to the story, with vested interests and ties in multiple nations, and a dry wit that leaves the reader grimacing at some points and laughing at others.

But laughter isn’t found easily in such a comic, where the material doesn’t shy away from the bitter situation that is a reality for so many people.There isn’t even a sense of pleasure in the killings of rebel soldiers by Dr.Moses; unlike Tarantino’s Nazi-revenge flick Inglourious Basterds, the bad guys are more complicated and are mainly children.And when one of the rebel children Dr.Moses kills makes a delusional appearance to him as a zombie,his backstory of being forced into the army against the will is emphasized again for the reader,lest they forget the circumstances that drove these “bad guys”to killing. The illustrations are graphic, and it is heart rending to see Dr.Moses vividly slay such children in order to save others who have thusfar been spared from such fighting.

Perhaps that’s why the critically acclaimed Unknown Soldiers deserves of all the attention it’s been receiving- it is an honest, critical look at a region where, as one character wrly notes, “the difference between night and day can be very complicated” and “there is no higher authority than [a] child’s gun”. The ending paves an open road for a story that will lead to an anticipated intersection between a vengeful Dr.Moses and the brutish Joseph Kony, and volume II can’t come soon enough.

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