After reading Tim O’Brien’s definition of a true war story in his book The Things They Carried, it seemed valid to review one war story that would seem to be immediately branded as false, and for good reason--Captain America, AKA Steve Rogers, the Brooklyn wimp turned unstoppable supersoldier that began as a propaganda piece of a comic book in the early days of World War II to stir nationalist support of U.S. entry into the war. After his WWII days, the Good Captain returned to comic nerds’ hands to fight Communists, then joining the fantastical superhuman team known as the Avengers in 1963. Since then, he has been one of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters, known for his outward belief in morality and his own country. On the surface, this is clearly false by O’Brien’s definition of a true war story, beyond simply being a work of fiction. However, in the character’s travels since his return to the pages in the ‘60s, he has developed into a perfect mold of a true war story--the clean colors of the flag wash into sorrow and terror and joy and an unforgiving attention to detail that will indeed, as O’Brien says, “make the stomach believe”.
The falsities of the Star Spangled Man’s story are so glaringly obvious that they almost don’t bear mentioning--Captain Rogers is always a man of morals and swears unwavering allegiance to the American ideal. His heroism seems undying and unchanging--indeed, the character doesn’t seem to develop much of anything after living through multiple wars. While such a thing is certainly possible, the story, even if factual, tells no truths about war, and in that way almost romanticizes it. He truly does have a moral to his stories, which O’Brien outright states is exactly what cannot exist in a true war story. As a piece of propaganda, this would mean it had done its job well, so perhaps congratulations are in order for Captain America’s 1940s writers, in fact, for making the character so two dimensional. That said, this two-dimensional Steve Rogers was the beginning of the Captain, and only that.
As Captain America made the transition from propaganda piece to a comic book character artistically free of his bondage to only showing the good of his country and of war, his stories began to take darker turns, going so far as to mentally break the once stainless Captain, sending him into a true and deep depression. Undoubtedly, the first of such examples is in being put in suspended animation, awaking in a different era entirely. Rogers becomes out of touch with the people and culture he once felt closest to at this point, finding his sweetheart back home already married to another, most of his friends dead and gone, leaving him quite literally all alone. This stark loneliness, however, does not take 20 years suspended in ice to obtain--simply going to war for awhile does the trick. No longer does Rogers romanticize war, nor give an uplifting message about it, for it has left him without all he knew and loved, and left all he knew and loved without him.
Not only did the Boy in Blue and Red stop making good of all war, he came close to ceasing to believe in his country. In the early 2000s, Captain Rogers hunts down a man codenamed “Nuke”, an attempt at creating another Captain America that went AWOL during the Vietnam War. Nuke captures Steve and holds him hostage, forcing him to watch endless broadcasts of all the American atrocities committed, all the gore and bloodshed meaninglessly employed by Captain Rogers’ superiors that he valued so highly. Rogers escaped after a few weeks of this captivity, but was forever haunted by the memories of what he learned. No longer would he trust his superiors without full disclosure. Again, as in O’Brien’s criteria, this story had no nice wrap-up ending--for Rogers, it never ended. He would be faced with these memories as long as he carried the shield, or wore his flag.
The final piece to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Captain America has moved from his propagandist origins to being a true character--more than that, a true story, in O’Brien’s terms--is that, as in O’Brien’s definition, his stories tend to have an unrelenting commitment to gruesome detail that pains the listener, embarrasses them, spares no moment for fear it might go too far. In recent years, the Man Out of Time found himself stranded in the land of an old enemy, where he discovered his enemy, Dr. Arnim Zola, now had a son. Uncomfortable with the idea of Zola raising a child, Captain America steals the child of his enemy and raises him as his own. More than that, Rogers raises this boy with the intent that he will one day kill his father without knowing it was him. Upon finding out Zola is his true parentage more than ten years later, the boy turns on Rogers and tries to kill him, and the comic spares the reader no moment of the battle, right up until the boy--considered a son by two bitter enemies--dies at the hands of Captain America, Steve Rogers. Captain Rogers didn’t just kill an innocent man. No, he had done that before, multiple times. Captain Rogers killed the boy he raised as his own son. And that was a loss that would never leave him, even after he defeated Zola and returned home to a world that was, once again, out of sync with him.
Truly, Captain America in his modern forms shows no trace of his propaganda beginnings, beyond name and basic premise. The character of Steve Rogers has been repeatedly broken, twisted and mangled mentally and physically by the wonderful monstrosity that is war of every kind, for good or evil, as Captain America now realizes he has fought on both sides. The Good Captain is no longer a hero of epic proportions, unparalleled courage and strength and kindness and self-sacrifice, but a broken man whose only choice is to move forward and believe the things he always has.
For when war strikes such finishing blows, what else does one have left but shreds of oneself to cling to?
I thought this was very good. Arguing that any superhero's story is a true war story is difficulty, especially one that is so associated with idealism, and you present a very thorough argument here. I also loved how you used pretty much every single nickname the Captain has.
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