Up Front Once More

As a battle-scarred veteran with two wars to his credit, Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, 43, has developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of gunfire. He was practically weaned Up Front.* A downy-cheeked sergeant in World War II, he drafted the immortal dogfaces Willie and Joe, followed up in 1952 with a sketch-board tour of combat in Korea. Sooner or later he was sure to wind up in South Viet Nam, and last week Cartoonist Mauldin was once more up to his ears in his natural element.

Not long after he reached Saigon, Mauldin beat his way 240 miles north to Pleiku, where his son Bruce, 21, a helicopter pilot, was flying combat missions. One of his first discoveries was that war correspondence is not what it used to be. In World War II, said Mauldin, newsmen joined a combat unit, slogged along with the men, lived the combat life for weeks or even months. But Mauldin was the only newspaperman at Pleiku. "These boys," said he of the station's troops, "are sitting out there like outposts in Indian country"--visited only rarely by correspondents, who fly up from Saigon, stay a day or two, and fly back again.

The night after his arrival, Mauldin had scarcely composed himself for sleep when Viet Cong guerrillas opened fire in the assault that flared into an international incident. "That sounds like mortars," said Mauldin to his hutmate, an Army colonel. Ignoring instructions to dive into the nearest bunker, Mauldin sprinted into action while chattering out loud in English as a precautionary measure: clad only in shorts, he was eager not to be mistaken for one of the Viet Cong, who habitually sport such abbreviated battle dress.

"It was pretty hairy," said Mauldin later. "I'm a middle-aged civilian, and it's been a long time since I was shot at." Civilian Mauldin's reactions were those of a hash-marked veteran. Unlimbering his camera, he snapped a comprehensive image of the destruction, pausing only to help carry a wounded U.S. soldier to safety. He sent the pictures home, along with cabled eyewitness accounts, and he also fulfilled another self-assigned combat responsibility: he relayed messages to the wives of U.S. servicemen on duty at Pleiku, assuring them that their husbands had come through unharmed.

The Sun-Times plastered Mauldin's coverage all over the paper. In the heat of battle, the cartoonist put pen and sketching pad aside for more urgent assignments, but by week's end, he had delivered a batch of drawings from Up Front.

* The title of Mauldin's 1945 bestselling prose-cartoon book on World War II.

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