The animated prologue to The Punisher: Extended Cut (2006) acts as a disturbing com-mentary on both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The segment — which takes place before Frank Castle has become the invincible, mass-murdering vigilante known as the Punisher — updates the title character’s wartime experience to Desert Storm, rather than Vietnam, as it was in the Punisher comic books. According to the film, in 1991, Castle’s pla-toon enters Kuwait City in search of “escaped Republican Guard suspects” who “tortured and killed two U.N. Peacekeepers.” Ambushed in a town square by the very Republican Guard suspects they are pursuing, they suffer heavy losses. It is only thanks to Castle — who runs out into the open and, with preternaturally good aim, wounds and captures the enemy combatants — that the rest of the unit survives the unexpected assault. Castle then delivers the two prisoners to the major in charge of his unit.
CASTLE: Secure the prisoners.
MAJOR: Secure them? We’re gonna terminate these murderers right here, right now.
CASTLE: You’re not authorized to execute these prisoners, sir. There’s no justice in that.
MAJOR: They’re not soldiers, they’re terrorists.
CASTLE: They say the same thing about us.
MAJOR: Where’s the justice in what they did?
CASTLE: You pull that trigger, you’re guilty of murder, sir.
After convincing the major not to kill the prisoners, Castle walks off, disgusted with how bloodthirsty his comrades are. Unfortunately, one of the captives proves suicidal, lunges for a grenade on the major’s belt, and blows himself and the rest of Castle’s unit to smithereens. Castle looks on in horror from outside the blast radius at his former comrades,
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who are dead because he showed a defeated enemy mercy. In this moment, the Punisher is born, and Frank Castle loses all willingness to give a murderer a second chance.
The scene is effective, and helps explain how Castle developed his harsh sense of “moral-ity,” but what conclusions are viewers supposed to draw from this scene? Is the Geneva Convention a bad idea? Is it impossible to reform or deprogram criminals and terrorists?
Are all enemy combatants, especially Muslim enemy combatants, suicide bombers who should be shot on sight rather than captured? While the “war on terror” certainly involves fanatical opponents who cannot be reasoned with, who would love to see America and Israel wiped off the map, there are too many Muslims in the world to paint with the same broad brush that this segment would like to hand viewers. Thinking in those terms leads danger-ously close to advocating a policy of endless warfare in the Middle East, and endorsing a genocidal campaign against members of the Islamic faith, rather than supporting a policy that involves the possibility of diplomacy, redemption, and peace. Abdulaziz Sachedina, chair of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, is one of many scholars who have warned against this kind of fatalistic thinking. In “From Defensive to Offensive Warfare:
The Use and Abuse of Jihad in the Muslim World” (2002), he argues that Muslims are not uniformly fanatical in their thinking about religion, international relations, and jihad, as they are often portrayed in the media, and that Westerners need to be aware of this to aid in more nuanced, peaceful negotiations in the future.
The segment in the Punisher film is meant to be taken seriously by audience members, who are supposed to condemn Castle for being naïve in granting the enemy mercy, and who are meant to celebrate his hardening into the Punisher. On the other hand, a similar wartime back-story provided for the Punisher in the comic books is far more satirically written, criticizing the Punisher for losing his humanity. In stark contrast to the film, rather than validate American aggression abroad, this comic book also blames American imperialism above all else for creating the monster that is the Punisher. Writer Garth Ennis suggests that lunatics like Frank Castle are a natural consequence of the insane culture of the United States, with its brutal capitalism, gun-crazy culture, terrible racial injustices, and imperialist wars overseas. Ennis, a native of Northern Ireland, expressed these views eloquently in the ultra-violent comic book The Punisher: Born (2003), which retains the Vietnam War setting the character was originally designed to inhabit rather than updating the military engagement to Desert Storm. Nevertheless, the story takes a revisionist look at the character’s fictional origins.
Traditionally, Frank Castle has been portrayed as a normal, law-abiding citizen who returned from an honorable tour of duty in Vietnam to become a police officer and live a normal life with his wife and children. When his family witnesses a mob hit during a picnic in the park, they are at the wrong place at the wrong time, and are machine-gunned to death by the Mafia. Even though Castle physically survives his own wounds, he has been transformed mentally into the Punisher, a merciless, one-man army who declares war on the Mafia and all other hardcore criminals around the world. While this origin has been widely referenced by comic books for years, and embraced by fans of the character, both the Desert Storm back story of the Punisher film and the Vietnam-set Born miniseries rep-resent a departure from the established origin, arguing that the Punisher was in fact born on a battlefield overseas and not thanks to a domestic tragedy that occurred stateside after his military service ended.
In Born, Ennis tells the story of Castle’s service in the Vietnam War, making it evident that he grew to enjoy killing for its own sake during his repeated tours of duty as a marine,
sniper, and member of black ops between 1968 and 1971. As the war was becoming more unpopular back home and it looked like Castle’s unit would be withdrawn from their posi-tion near the Cambodian border, he took extreme steps to prolong his unit’s stay so he could continue fighting to the last possible second.
Throughout the story, Castle demonstrates a twisted sense of mercy and morality in the field, prefiguring the odd moral code he adopts as the Punisher. When his unit captures a female Viet Cong sniper, one of his men rips her uniform off and begins raping her. Castle shoots and seriously wounds the sniper to save her from the rape, telling his men, “No rape.
We’re here to kill the enemy. That’s all.” Later, Castle finds the would-be rapist alone, wash-ing his face off in a lake. Castle places his boot on the back of the rapist’s head, pushwash-ing him underwater and drowning him.
The Punisher’s ruthlessness in wartime is contrasted with the comparable innocence of one of his platoon, the sweet, blonde-haired Stevie Goodwin, who wonders aloud, “Why can’t we stay out of the rest of the world?” and hopes that Vietnam is a bad chapter in an otherwise glorious history of the United States. Another member of the platoon, Angel, is a black soldier who chastises Goodwin for his naïveté. During one of the key scenes in the story, he says, “I keep hearin’ you talk about this idea you got — this real America? It’s a fuckin’ dream, man. It belongs in ... the Wild muthafuckin’ West. That’s the real America, right there: back when you was shootin’ each other, rapin’ red Indians an’ callin’ me nigga....
An’ don’t be given me none o’ that shit ’bout how there’s good along wit’ the bad. How all everybody gotta do is work hard an’ they gonna make it. There’s good for you and there’s bad for me, Stevie. Ain’t no more to it than that.” Angel adds, “All I got waitin’ for me’s a ghetto fulla death.” Angel’s speech not only reveals a lot about his character, his life, and his relationship to Stevie, it also serves as the moral backbone of the story, simultaneously indicting both the insane Frank Castle and the insane United States of America that created him.
The Punisher: Born grows more satirical, violent, and supernatural as it progresses, building to a surreal climactic battle scene. The story ends with a massive Viet Cong attack on Firebase Valley Forge in which both Angel and Stevie die. Castle is the only survivor.
As he stands alone, killing hundreds of enemy combatants single-handedly, Castle hears the voice of the devil offering a gift:
Castle loves war.
Vietnam may be ending, but Castle can have another war — an endless one.
But there will be an unnamed price.
All he has to do is say “Yes.”
Castle madly cries “Yes!” to the unseen, demonic speaker, and survives the battle. The demon has granted Castle some form of invulnerability, and promised Castle a never-end-ing-war-on-crime. In the epilogue of Born, Castle returns home from duty and is greeted at the airport by his wife and children. It is only then that Castle learns that his deal with the devil will cost his family their lives. As he looks upon his wife and children, the vision of a skull appears over them, and the voice of the demon asks, Remember I said there would be a price?
In addition to satirizing the destruction caused by American military action abroad, Born is about the terrible psychological scars that Vietnam veterans brought back with them from their wartime service. Even though most veterans did not return to witness their fam-ilies killed by the Mafia, many did effectively lose their famfam-ilies to the war. They found
themselves unable to reconcile the evils they had witnessed — and in some cases had com-mitted — with a placid domestic life. Their families could not understand the depths of their guilt, or their pain, and many of their marriages ended in divorce. According to William P. Mahedy, author of Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets:
Religious America, Christian America, was complicit in two assaults on the faith of its young veterans. The first was perpetuating the war itself while tolerating the endorsements and mythology that surround war in our culture. The second was scapegoating the veterans, lay-ing full responsibility for what happened on their shoulders. Scapegoatlay-ing amounted to an implicit recognition that war was evil. Like Pontius Pilate ... the American people washed their hands of the war, assuaging their own consciences by treating the veterans as moral out-casts....
Vets were considered moral outcasts, baby killers, perpetrators of atrocities. One did not associate with such people and retain one’s own sense of self-worth. The message from these guardians of America’s conscience was clear: Vietnam veterans were pariahs. They were immoral and evil people. To their own peer group, those with whom they had grown up, with whom they shared the same Little League games, rock music, sexual adventures, they had become nonpersons [41, 46–47].
The 1982 film First Blood dramatizes the suffering, unemployment, and social casti-gation that fictional Italian American vet John Rambo (played by Sylvester Stallone) endured upon his return home from his tour of duty. When he goes to a small town to visit a former comrade-in-arms, the local sheriff persecutes him and arrests him for vagrancy. When Rambo is tormented in the police station, he suffers a flashback to his time as a prisoner of war and breaks out, starting his own, personal Vietnam War on the American home front, killing the police and members of the National Guard to win back his freedom and self-respect. When he is finally captured by his former commanding officer from the Green Berets, he explains why he suffered such a violent breakdown:
Nothing is over! Nothing. You just don’t turn it off. It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you. And I did what I had to do to win. But somebody didn’t let us win. Then I came back to the world and I see all the maggots at the airport protesting me, spitting, calling me baby killer, and all kinds
of vile crap. Who are they to protest me, huh?
Who are they, unless they been me and been there and know what the hell they’re yelling about?
... for me civilian life is nothing. In the field, we had a code of honor.
You watch my back and I watch yours. Back here, there’s nothing...
Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equip-ment. Back here I can’t even hold a job parking cars!
Sylvester Stallone from Rambo: First Blood Part II (Lions Gate, 1985).
The Rambo character is indicative of how Americans regarded the Vietnam War in the 1980s.
Since the war never ended in Rambo’s mind, he brought the war home with him and fought it anew on the streets of America. The Punisher did much the same thing. And the Punisher comic books, much like the crime exploitation films and the horror movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s that inspired them, brought images of the Vietnam War home to an “underground” audience to contemplate. Horror movie make-up man Tom Savini was a Vietnam War vet who explained that he worked out his experiences on the battlefield by recreating war wounds and corpses he saw first-hand in the zombie make-up he did for films such as Dawn of the Dead (1978). As David J. Skal writes in The Monster Show, “Horror films of the seventies and eighties began exhibiting symptoms remarkably similar to some of those suffered by victims of posttraumatic stress syndrome: startle reactions, paranoid, endless-scenes of guerilla-like stalking, and, like traumatic flashbacks, repeated images of nightmare assaults on the human body, especially its sudden and explosive destruction”
(311). Other violent films, whether they were “slasher” films like those in the Friday the 13th series, rape revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Last House on the Left (1972), or “you killed my family, prepare to die” films such as Death Wish (1974), all brought the war overseas back home.