Wow, what a kick in the hopes.
Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov have brought their MAX epic to a devastating close with Fury: My War Gone By #13, which not only highlights the futility of America’s warmongering around the globe in the 20th century, but the shattered, empty, miserable lives of those who were instrumental in waging those wars.
The series followed Nick Fury from the post-World War II era, where he’d earned a reputation as a war hero, throughout all his involvement with fighting the Cold War for the CIA – Indochina, Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, etc. Throughout it all, there was a lot of action and, well, fury – just enough of it to lull us into thinking we were reading a standard sort of war yarn. As time wore on, though, we began to see that every time Fury managed to be the hero, be it escaping enemy prisons or pulling his friend George Hatherly’s fat out of the fire du jour, his sense of victory was crushed by the realization that the politics of every conflict he was stirring up were murky as hell, and each situation was a much bigger clusterfuck than even he’d imagined.
Pulling his strings was always Senator Pug McCuskey, a polite slimeball who always knew which buttons to push. He embodied the paranoia of the 1960s about containing Communism, and became oilier and oilier as the years went on, much to the chagrin of Shirley DeFabio, his one-time secretary and eventual wife, who nonetheless had a long-term fiery affair with Fury. Once that dried up, the truth began to come out. Pug knew about it the whole time, and chose to reveal that when he knew Shirley had become too entrenched in the life of a senator’s wife to actually leave him. He also knew exactly what notes to play to keep Fury in his pocket, no matter how much we kept thinking throughout this story that Pug was eventually going to get his.
In this issue, he does, but there’s none of the visceral satisfaction you usually get in comic books when a piece of shit gets what’s coming to him. Instead, it’s a hollow, depressing bit of gruesome business that brings no satisfaction to anyone beyond finally ending Shirley’s pain and misery. Pug had decided to cash in on having Shirley under his thumb, and had the audacity to have his younger girlfriend move in with them, and Shirley had long lost her will to fight. That is, until the dying Hatherly, the true heart of this series, confesses on his deathbed that he always liked her, too. For the longest time, she thought her only choices were Pug or Fury – and Fury being a man addicted to war would be no better for her. This revelation crystallizes the mistakes of her life, and once that happens, the clock is ticking, and her gun is clicking, illustrating the abject failures of everyone’s personal lives
Well, George seemed to do decently enough, with a large family at his funeral – but that’s where Fury starts facing the full weight of his own mistakes. George’s family looks at Nick with scorn at the funeral, wanting nothing to do with him because he never visited George in the hospital. However, his granddaughter Courtney is curious enough to talk to him. To tell him that George didn’t hold that against him because he knew Nick didn’t have the kind of courage to handle “hospitals and sickness and weakness, and people dying without having something to fight.” A deep body blow to a man like Nick, to be thought a kind of coward by one of the very few people he could call a friend.
Another gut punch is meeting with Letrong Giap at the Vietnam Memorial. Giap once held Nick and George captive during the war there, and was long assumed dead. However here, in 1999, long after the war stopped meaning anything – if it ever did – Giap has no enmity left. Just laments for the fallen, the abused faith of soldiers by the utterly corrupt bastards who send them to war, and the sheer pointlessness of the entire conflict when, even in driving out the U.S., the “cruelty and tyranny” Giap’s countrymen had used to win the war carried over to destroy the peace. “We are both bound for hell, Colonel Fury,” he says, extanding a hand. “But I hope you find a comfortable place to wait.”
Nothing meant anything. This comes after the previous issues of watching Barracuda completely shit on the legacy of the U.S. Marine Corps by being a corrupt, drug-running sociopathic thug in Nicaragua, the nail in the coffin of Hatherly’s CIA career. Even at the end of last issue, when Fury gave us our last sense of empty vengeance by tracking Barracuda down and breaking every bone in his body, he summed up the whole thing as meaning “about as much as my next shit.” Issue #13 is where Ennis drives that all home. Nothing meant anything, and Nick Fury is left alone in a dark room, dictating his life story into an antique reel-to-reel, circling the drain and waiting to die. Hoping to die. Reflecting on the absolute failure of America, and his own horrible contributions to the cancer of corruption that he was too blind to see until it was far too late.
This is a soul-crusher. Ennis piles on the hopelessness and smothers us under it, while Parlov’s dark art and broken-down characters remind us of mortality and constant regret. It speaks to our worst, most cynical thoughts about the state of the world. The insurmountable nature of entrenched, corrupt power serving its own ends instead of the electorate. The manufactured reasons for going to war that resulted in thousands upon thousands of useless deaths. Hatherly explained what he believed the colors of the American flag to represent back in the 1950s, and those are the words ringing in Fury’s head as he whithers away. “The debt we owe to the past, and the responsibility we owe to the future. It’s right there for all to see. Blood on the bandaged wounds of brave men, and all the stars in the sky.”
Fury: My War Gone By is a disheartening story about the machinery of war crushing everyone in its way, and the broken promise of our national ideals. It’s the ugliness of our world stage laid bare, it’s lonesome as all hell, and it’s an ordeal absolutely worth the read. Worth the burden it puts on your shoulders once you finish it.
Garth Ennis can tell a fucking story.
