After nearly a decade away from his signature Marvel character, Garth Ennis is back with a new story about Frank Castle’s first command in Punisher: The Platoon. And, though it’s always worth reading any Ennis/Punisher book, Platoon wasn’t as great a reunion comic as I’d hoped.
The current version of The Punisher is a veteran of an unspecified war, so as not to date him; Ennis’ Punisher is firmly the original version of the character whose war was Vietnam. If you haven’t read Ennis’ Punisher before, his thesis on the character is that The Punisher was “born” during Vietnam, caged when he returned to civilian life and then given an excuse to run amok after Frank’s family were killed by mobsters during a picnic at the park. The Punisher: Born explored that origin, which was basically the final chapter of Frank Castle; Platoon is the beginning of that story, leading up to Born.
And yet, while the premise supposedly explores the possibility of whether the war made Frank into the killing machine he became or whether he could’ve possibly been someone else, really the main characters are in the subtitle: the platoon, the soldiers who served under him.
Ennis’ forte is unquestionably war comics. War Stories is his best series, closely followed by Battlefields and it’s no surprise that his best work for Marvel has been on The Punisher and Nick Fury, two characters with military backgrounds. Ennis sets aside his juvenile humour when writing these stories and the deep respect and fascination he has for the subject of military history shines through in the enormous level of detail lavished throughout these scripts.
Platoon is thoroughly-researched and Ennis paints a convincing picture of army life, from defending remote hills, having to illegally barter for reliable equipment, and the tension between the various military divisions. I completely believe that while the characters are fictional, their experiences and views are reflective of the real men who lived that war. Ennis is also careful to write equally human Vietnamese characters in the Vietcong officer, Letrong Giap, and the fierce soldier who sets her sights on Frank, Ly Quang. This isn’t some one-sided flag-waving nationalistic rubbish, Ennis is going for as objective a view of the conflict as he can.
And this is where I always feel like a shallow piece of shit for critiquing any book that’s about serious real-life, world-changing events: I was kinda bored reading it. The various characters of Platoon, while realistic, weren’t terribly interesting. There isn’t really a story – Frank and his platoon have a few skirmishes and that’s it. That said, when Frank gets into gear, he’s utterly compelling and that final episode in the swamp was really something. Also, rather than his usual portrayal as a haunted husk of a man, Frank here is at least semi-human, heroically winning the respect of his men through selfless action, determined to bring every one of them home, willing to listen to them, and thus bring the best out of them. He remains a tragic figure though: the sad irony being that he brought every man under his command home but ultimately left himself behind.
It’s well put-together but there’s nothing here you won’t have already seen or read in any other Vietnam movie or book. Despite the Punisher perspective, it’s fairly indistinct as another generic ‘Nam story. War is hell, nobody can truly know what it was really like, etc. The premise is kind of irrelevant too – does it matter when during Vietnam, or after, Frank decided to put on the skull tee? He still ended up The Punisher. The same goes for Goran Parlov’s art: it’s detailed, accurate and skilful but also looks fairly unmemorable.
Though he continues to crank out meaninglessly provocative drivel like A Train Called Love or bad one-joke books like Jimmy’s Bastards, The Punisher: Platoon shows that Ennis can still write worthwhile comics when he puts his mind to it. But he’s also been able to tell similar stories before and be as entertaining as he is informative and insightful which, unfortunately, he doesn’t fully achieve in Platoon.