Ex Astris: Return to the Moon
Here’s a one-page Ex Astris strip we’ve created for the Apollo anniversary celebration over on the forum for the British comics site, downthetubes. (Click on the image for the full size version).
If you’re an artist who wants to contribute to this project, find out how you can do that here.As you can see, the mysterious Bryant – who also shows up in 2075 in “Secrets from Ceres” and in the ongoing strip set in the 26th Century – is one of the first “returnees” to the Moon, so Ex Astris fans will have realized there’s something very odd about him!
It was Mike who came up with the idea of using the line “In order to save the village, we had to destroy it”, made infamous during the Vietnam war (and which re-surfaced in discussion of the Iraq invasion).
The origin of the quote follows the destruction of the Vietnamese Village Ben Tre in March 1968, who my friend Mary Ellen over in the USA found has been attributed to an American major, named as Major Booris by Michael D. Miller, a former Captain, US Army Corps of Engineers on this web page.
However, Wikipedia suggests another source, USAF Major Chet Brown, after AP news man Peter Arnett, after witnessing and fiming the burning of the village (latershown on US news), says to Brown, “So you had to destroy the village in order to save it?” The major doesn’t actually say the infamous line but instead, “Let’s get down from here. We’re drawing fire.”
However, other internet sources suggest he original version of the phrase appears to have first been used in New Yorker in 1969.
It is used again during the “Winter Soldier Investigation” conducted in 1971, by one of the panellists, Dr. Sid Peck, Professor of Sociology, Case Western University; Visiting Professor at MIT.
Whatever the original source, it seemed apt for this strip.
Just as an addition to this, my friend Dave Reeder tells me the quote’s origins may go back even further than the Vietnam war. “The origin of this lies back in roman history,” he says, “that the empire had become so corrupt that the only way to restore its values was to destroy it and start again.”
How strange is that? On the day we published this strip, Riobert S. McNamara, creditted as the architect of the Vietnam War, died. See this news story in the Los Angeles Times. McNamara was the US The Defense secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson oversaw the buildup of US forces in Vietnam. He later voiced regrets about his decisions in the war.
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