A Close Look at DMZ part 7: Who's to Blame?

The term "friendly fire" is terribly antiseptic. It has the sound of something small scale and not lethal. The term can actually encompass anything from confusion on the ground to air and missile strikes and it definitely includes fatal incidents. The casualties might be military personnel. They might be peaceful civilians, perhaps civilians under that military's protection. And the unfortunate truth is they happen in every war. Given this, any extended story about a war would be remiss if it failed to address the topic, and that brings us to this story.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars saw their share of friendly fire casualties. Some were American soldiers. Some were Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. Some were civilians. One of the more notorious incidents was the Haditha Massacre. Brian Wood has spoken about how the coverage of that event, specifically the media's treatment of the soldiers involved, led to him changing this story to examine how soldiers put into impossible situations might make a mistake and then be hung out to dry by those higher in the chain of command.

The following contains spoilers for DMZ 18-22.

DMZ 18

Gun or No Gun?

After the events of "Public Works" Matty' has gained significant credibility both domestically and internationally. Liberty News brings him in to cover the military trial of a squad of soldiers implicated in a mass killing in the DMZ. The event in question is called the Day 204 Massacre (which was first alluded to in the "guidebook" that was issue 12). U.S. soldiers opened fire on an identified crowd of people walking near their patrol and killed 198 civilians. It turned out that the crowd was marching in protest of the war (though they had no clothing or paraphernalia identifying them). The Day 204 Massacre is credited with the United States losing the moral high ground in the war.

Matty's coverage begins with interviews. He starts with PFC Chris Stevens who is in custody. The private is from rural South Dakota and only joined the army because a judge gave him the choice of that or jail. He received six weeks' training in boot camp and was then deployed to Manhattan which was a hot spot of urban warfare.

The other soldiers on trial reported that they opened fire after a protester pulled a gun on them. Stevens never fired. After the incident Stevens was reassigned. Distrusting Stevens because he didn't fire his gun and was troubled by the incident, members of his old unit beat him on multiple occasions. Ultimately, tired of their abuse, Stevens went public and testified before congress.

DMZ 18

Stevens's recounting of the event places him in the back of the unit as they approached the protesters. He recalls that the protester did not draw a gun before the unit commander, Sergeant Nunez, ordered the unit to open fire.

Matty's second interview is with Sergeant Nunez. The sergeant recalls how he came to serve in Manhattan. He was stationed in Iraq when the war broke out. A New York native, Nunez requested a transfer back home. His CO denied the transfer saying he hadn't "killed enough ragheads yet." Nunez says that a few weeks later (after presumably killing a lot of Iraqis) he got his transfer.

In his retelling of the massacre, Stevens was closer to the unit as it approached the protesters. A gun was drawn at which point Nunez ordered the unit to open fire. Following the shooting he ordered Stevens to collect every shell casing he could find. After a debrief his CO decided his actions checked out. When the site of the massacre was investigated a gun was found. Wrapping up his statement to Matty, Nunez maintains that the the protesters were an armed mob with "unmistakable hostile intent." He finishes by saying that "you" (it's unclear if he means military leadership, the government, or the public at large) gave him the tools for war and should get out of his way so he can use them.

DMZ 19

Interviews of DMZ residents, including a friend of Zee's named Dina, Wilson, the leader of a DMZ faction called the Nation of Fearghus, and the King, are up next. Dina was in the middle of the protesters and walked away having been shot in the head (the art suggests it was relatively minor). While she thinks in hindsight that the crowd were fools, she believes that the soldiers should die for what they did. Wilson is somewhat indifferent, believing that it wasn't and still isn't Chinatown's problem. The Nation of Fearghus leader lost his two brothers in the protest and has killed seven hundred and fifty four soldiers since. He tells Matty that each one of his brothers is worth a thousand of the soldiers who killed them. The King (the sniper who went AWOL) is somewhat contradictory. First he says that the protesters were murdered, but he immediately follows that up by talking about how the war's early days were disorganized, the troops were quick to fire, and that every war causes collateral damage. He finishes by telling Matty that the military higher ups won't face any consequences and that Nunez and his men will be hung out to dry. Though he isn't actually interviewing her, Zee does have things to say. She asks Matty if Stevens did it (suggesting he shot the protesters). She follows that up by saying that there may not be a greater explanation for what happened--that it's just one of those horrible things that happens in war and maybe it shouldn't be any more special than the other times innocent people have been killed in this or any other war.

The following day Liberty summons Matty to meet a U.S. general. The general discusses the problems inherent to fighting an asymmetrical war. He describes how in those early days of fighting there were breakdowns in communications. He tells Matty that soldiers have to be trusted to do their jobs. When Matty asks him if the soldiers did their jobs that day, the general answers that they did; he says that he would accept, even order, another Day 204 because while it was a bad call, they have to be willing to live with bad calls for all the other times they get the call right. As the incident is shown again (while the general is talking) the protester does not pull a gun before Nunez orders his unit to open fire.

DMZ 22

The general, it turns out, is speaking to Matty at the same time the tribunal releases its verdict (the soldiers are acquitted and dishonorably discharged), preventing Matty from covering that. As Matty returns to the DMZ he remarks that the expectation was the city would riot if the tribunal came back with anything other than full criminal charges against the military leadership (though it's worth noting that at no time in the story is it suggested anyone higher up than Nunez's squad is on trial). The city does indeed riot. The day after the verdict a helicopter crewed by unidentified soldiers flies to the DMZ and tosses Stevens out. The rioting crowd recognizes him and beats him to death, burning itself out afterward.

Matty's Best Story

"Friendly Fire" is by far the most successful arc of the series thus far. It puts Matty in the middle of a story that, unlike "Public Works", he hasn't formed an opinion about ahead of time. He also isn't being pressured to push an agenda like what happened with the Ghosts. There's also no large organization committing villainous atrocities such as Viktor's murder in "Body of a Journalist" and Trustwell's terrorist financing in "Public Works". All of this leads to a story where Matty's choices drive the narrative. And while the stakes are high, it's a relatively quiet story.

This somewhat lowkey presentation of the massacre might lead to complaints that it would have been more interesting if the massacre happened in the present. Certainly this would have made the event more visceral and possibly more horrific because its significance would be attached to the series' main character. Also the DMZ's residents' reactions would be fresh and raw--the kind of reactions that could lead to major upheaval in the city. Those potential positives would almost certainly be liabilities, though. An event like the Day 204 Massacre is not going to leave the public consciousness quickly. It would be unrealistic for the subject to not come up repeatedly in future issues, especially in stories involving the U.S. military. The alternative would be a time jump to avoid addressing the massacre on a regular basis, but that would almost certainly feel cheap and unsatisfying. Presenting the massacre as the story does avoids that problem and allows Matty to examine why the massacre happened, whether something like it could happen again, how the war has unfolded since, and what it means in the context of the larger conflict.

The way the story is told also allowed Wood to inject a little ambiguity by using a Roshomon style device in the retelling of the event. Stevens's flashback places him several paces behind the unit and establishes that there was no gun. On the other hand, Nunez's flashback puts Stevens among the rest of the unit and insists there was a gun. The most curious flashback comes during the interview scene with the general. The protester is not drawing a gun (at least it's not visible yet). Paired with the general's statement that Day 204 was a bad call, the implication is that Stevens's account is accurate. Of course the general wasn't present for the shooting, so it's possible to read this as the general believing Stevens despite not knowing which account is correct. In truth, though, Wood's crafting of the story all but states that it's Stevens who's telling the truth. First we have Nunez's instruction to collect the shell casings after the shooting. The flashback to the investigation also strongly suggests the gun was planted after the fact. And Nunez is presented as an unsympathetic, almost bloodthirsty character.

DMZ 19

Manufactured by the Military?

For all Nunez's apparent faults, though, the story offers a critical bit of insight for him when he tells Matty that the military/government gave him the tools to do this job and they should get out of his way and let him do it. This argues that Nunez's actions flow almost inevitably from what the military turned him into. When Nunez's CO tells him he has to kill more "ragheads" it's easy to see Nunez's environment as a damaging one. And in a way this reflects what the general says in defense of Day 204--that tolerating events like it are necessary to fight a war; it's an inevitable consequence of the way the military works. Both of these exchanges offer some justification for the end result of the military tribunal. I don't know if Wood intended this reading, but it feels like a reasonable conclusion to come to.

If Wood did mean for this interpretation of how the military creates people like Nunez and beliefs like the general's, though, it makes what happened to Stevens even worse. Stevens was practically forced into the army. In a nice moment of symmetry, his joining up with the U.S. instead of the Free States gets him in a fight with Free States supporters; this violent, jingoistic Free States supporter is the inverse of the violent, jingoistic U.S. supporter we saw in "Zee, NYC". After Stevens reports for service he receives six weeks' training before getting dropped into a raging, chaotic urban war that quickly lost any sense of order as communications deteriorated. In a way it suggests that Stevens's failure to open fire happened because the military hadn't successfully given him the same "tools" it gave Nunez.

When all is said and done, Wood does address these very questions via the King. He believes Nunez's unit committed murder, but he also recognizes that incidents like the massacre happen in war and the military produces soldiers who will cause them. But if the King is right and incidents like the Day 204 Massacre are inevitable, do the massacre and the soldiers involved deserve this kind of scrutiny?

DMZ 20

Wood asks this very question through the conversation between Matty and Zee. Matty is searching for some kind of truth behind the massacre--a way to explain the significance of what happened and what it means. Zee makes this more difficult for him when she asks why it has to mean anything. Why are the deaths of these people special in a way all the other deaths in the war aren't? If we take the interviews of Nunez, the general, and the King to mean that the the army's methods guarantee incidents like the Day 204 Massacre will happen, the only real response to Zee's question is that there's nothing special about it. This is not a uncomfortable answer.

Also of interest moment during this conversation is a panel that shows Matty's laptop screen as he's writing his article. The article's title is "Day 204 and the Great Lost Cause". I wish I knew for sure what Wood intended the "lost cause" to be. The logical guess would be the quest for some kind of justice. It could just as easily be about the larger war, though. Or perhaps, in a kind of meta commentary, it's the Matty's failure to find any kind of meaning to the event.

Making a Martyr

Despite the overall success of "Friendly Fire" in its examination of the characters, its attempt to give the nominal antagonists reasonable (if controversial) motives, and its presentation of possibly the most complex issues the series has raised so far, the story does falter in how it treats the military trial and PFC Stevens.

When the verdict in the trial is announced, Matty comments that the DMZ wanted criminal charges filed against military leadership. As I pointed out earlier, at no point in the story is there a suggestion that anyone further up the chain of command is under investigation. Stevens never raises the idea that the massacre is the result of a mistake made by officers above Nunez. His only assertion is that Nunez, in the heat of the moment, ordered his unit to open fire and then (presumably?) lied about it. Additionally, no one claims that the military at large was attempting to cover up what really happened; rather, the charge is that Nunez lied to his CO. Given all of that, I don't understand why there would be any kind of penalty for them. If one of the larger themes of this story was how military leadership avoids the consequences from these incidents, Wood failed to make clear why they should face any consequences. In fact, Wood failed to even identify what charges Nunez's unit faces. This does somewhat undercut the riot in the DMZ that results from the acquittals because, given what limited information we have, there was no reason to expect an extreme outcome.

Related to the confusion over the trials is the poorly explained treatment of Stevens. Matty's interview with Stevens establishes that he's incarcerated (the reason is never explained, though presumably its because he's also been implicated in the massacre). Nunez, meanwhile, is not in custody even though the story suggests he's also on trial. There's no attempt to justify this disparity nor does Matty ever consider it. Matty also doesn't interrogate Stevens's charge that he suffered multiple beatings from the other soldiers in his unit, and he doesn't raise the matter with Nunez. As a result the beatings themselves don't make sense. If Stevens hadn't spoken up about or publicly second guessed the events of Day 204, why would he have been beaten? Perhaps the beatings were intend to convince Stevens not to speak out but since the story never claimed that he intended to, they come off as shallow attempts to elicit sympathy for the one character brave enough to talk.

The reactions of people in the DMZ are also difficult to understand. While it makes sense that they would view everyone involved in the massacre with hostility, there seems to be a special hatred for Stevens. At the beginning of the DMZ interview issue Zee asks Matty if Stevens "did it". She acts like Stevens, the one soldier who talked about about the massacre, is the only one of them who's guilty. In the final issue, after Stevens has been tossed into the DMZ by unidentified soldiers (their faces are covered so presumably this isn't a sanctioned operation), the response from a rioter is to call him out as "You're...that...guy. It's the soldier from the massacre!". The implication is that Stevens, for some reason, is more guilty than the rest of his unit and more deserving of retaliation--almost that it was Stevens who was responsible for the whole thing. And this despite the fact that the only reason people know what (presumably) happened is because he spoke up.

DMZ 22

The story's treatment of Stevens only makes sense in the context of the story's final pages. Wood treats Stevens as a martyr (on the final page he is depicted in full military garb standing tall over the city's skyline). The story moves Stevens through a set of circumstances that continually build him up as a victim of a military that refuses to take responsibility for its soldiers' mistakes. The military trials don't deliver a heavy penalty on the soldiers, but Stevens is killed in an apparent display of how the honest soldier is the soldier that gets punished. Given how thoroughly Wood examines the overall situation, I don't think it was necessary to twist the plot to reach this ending. It sidesteps any consideration of how Stevens only came forward out of spite as well as any potential trauma resulting from the massacre and being on trial for something he maintains he didn't do. Stevens could meet the same fate without inflating his virtue.

Visual Memories

Series artist Riccardo Burchielli was originally contracted for ten issues a year. He and Wood set up his break to sync with "Friendly Fire". Guest artists came in to handle the flashback sequences as well as the DMZ interview issue while Burchielli handled the frames for the flashbacks and the final two issues which were Matty-centric. Wood remarked that this was done to reinforce the Roshomon device, and it works to great effect.

Viktor Kalvachev, DMZ 19

Nathan Fox handled Stevens's flashbacks in issues 18 and 19. Fox was also influenced by Haditha, and in Stevens he saw someone who was a shell of a man after experiencing the massacre and later speaking up. Fox said in an interview that he enjoyed destroying Stevens from the inside out (despite growing to like him in the process). What Fox described is plainly visible in his sequences as Stevens starts out rather innocent and unassuming only to steadily descend into dejection and horror. Fox's art also brings a visceral quality to Stevens's flashbacks that works very well for the violence that he was unprepared for.

Viktor Kalvachev drew Nunez's flashback which is already darker thanks to the way Nunez describes his situation. There's a kind of ugliness to Kalvachev's work in this sequence, and it gives Nunez an angry brutality. The story could have made no insinuations about who's story is correct but Kalvachev's art would indict Nunez nonetheless.

Kristian Donaldson brought a much softer sensibility to the story. Characters' expressions are mild compared to how Burchielli drew them (and in this case Fox and Kalvachev as well). Her issue also feels somewhat lighter. The characters don't seem quite as weighed down by the harshness of the DMZ or the pressure of the situation. After the power and intensity of the flashbacks in the prior two issues as well as the look Burchielli brought to the series, this is a pleasant departure.

Kristian Donaldson, DMZ 20

Perhaps most impressive was the way Jeromy Cox adjusted his use of color to complement each artist. His work with Fox and Kalvachev adds a lot of atmosphere to their respective flashback sequences and most critically creates greater distinction between the two presentations of the massacre. Most impressive, though, is what he brought to Donaldson's issue. Exterior daytime scenes are bright and create a feeling of openness. The dinner scene with Wilson is very warm. Matty's meeting with the Nation of Fearghus is dark and dangerous. These issues showcase Cox's versatility and significant talent.

"Friendly Fire" is not an arc to take lightly. It demolishes the titular term in favor of showing the brutality and avoidance of accountability that goes along with these incidents--incidents that all too often don't reverberate in the public consciousness for very long. You can't help but read this story and get caught up in the larger themes that Wood brings to bear. Of great interesting is how Wood doesn't have Matty reach a firm conclusion about what happened. Matty has a lot to say about the the people involved, Nunez and Stevens specifically, but when it comes to greater meaning Matty has no more understanding for these events than we do.

Matty's On-Again, Off-Again Liberty Love Affair

Back together with Liberty: ✔ (2 times in total)

Broken up with Liberty: ✔ (2 times in total)

Credits

Brian Wood: writer

Riccardo Burchielli, Nathan Fox: art, issue 18

Riccardo Burchielli, Nathan Fox, Viktor Kalvachev: art, issue 19

Kristian Donaldson: art, issue 20

Riccardo Burchielli: art, issue 21 and 22

Jeromy Cox: colors

Jared K. Fletcher: letters

For an index of all Close Look at DMZ entries, jump back to the landing page here, and for an issue-by-issue commentary check out Twitter @theroncouch #BWDMZ.

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