swamp ass

I liken John Constantine, protagonist of Vertigo's Hellblazer, to a fluff and peanut butter sandwich: The combination of a sardonic hero operating in a horror comic book excites my imagination's taste buds and I find myself licking the delicious aftertaste off the roof of my mouth long after I put one of his comics down.

But after 200-plus issues of his own series, Hellblazer, and a host of grade-A writers like Garth Ennis, Brian Azzarello and Mike Carey pulling his strings, getting innovative and interesting stories out of Constantine is no easy feat. However, new ongoing writer Andy Diggle (The Losers, Swamp Thing) had a surefire plan to inject new life into everyone's favorite trench-coat-wearing wiseass―he made him into the man he once was. "The thing I always loved about [Constantine] as a character was just that sharpness," says Diggle. "He looked sharp and he talked sharp and he was always six jumps ahead of everybody. And that actually got lost, really quite early on, in Hellblazer."

Since his introduction during Alan Moore's groundbreaking run on Swamp Thing during the mid '80s, John Constantine, occult detective/con man/general d-ckbag, has been saving the world one apocalyptic catastrophe at a time. For me, it's hard not to be enthralled by this chain-smoking Englishman who was always the man with the plan, who never took any guff from anybody, all while going up against the most heinous demon hellspawn and bogeymen that crossed his path. He was also, among other things, quite a dapper chap. Decked out in a smooth pinstripe suit with a stylish blond hairdo and crisp white gloves, he carried himself with the utmost confidence and gravitas whether assisting the DC pantheon during Crisis on Infinite Earths or stopping a South American cult from ending all human life on Earth.

But once Hellblazer started, Constantine slowly lost his suave edge. His hair became less tended, his clothes more wrinkled, and his posture more hunched―he was a shadow of the man he used to be.

After almost 20 years in the gutter, Constantine is ready to pull himself back up and put that familiar swagger back into his step, with Diggle's help. "I wanted to have him being the person manipulating others rather than him being manipulated," explains Diggle. "We've had quite a lot of John being led around by circumstances lately: him reacting rather than being proactive. So I wanted him to, as a character, kind of take stock of how things have gone for him and take a long, hard look at himself and say, 'I need to get my sh-- together'." But turning Constantine into the big shot he once was wasn't as simple for Diggle as getting John some new threads and a shave; it required a long, hard look at his past.

Back when he was a cocky young punk, Constantine botched up an exorcism in a place called Newcastle―an event Hellblazer fans are more than familiar with―which resulted in the death of a young girl. This drove Constantine a bit crazy and he ended up in an asylum called Ravenscar. "What I'm suggesting is that there was a part of himself that he left behind at Ravenscar," explains Diggle. "[A man named Dalton-Brewer, Ravenscar's warden] basically magically removed [Constantine's] insanity as if [it were] a separate part of himself, and that insanity has been residing at Ravenscar ever since. It's been semi-aware and it's been leeching off him psychically." Starting with Diggle's first issue, Hellblazer #230, Constantine becomes aware of this leech and orchestrates an elaborate plot involving gangsters and being tied up under a pier as high tide is coming in, to get himself back to Ravenscar. In issue #233 he confronts the entity and every demon (figuratively and literally) that's been haunting him for the past 20 or so years in a two-page spread horrifically (in a good way) drawn by series artist Leonardo Manco. As you might have guessed, Constantine comes out on top, fresh-faced and bushy-tailed, ready to start kicking ass and taking names.

At this point I'm pretty reinvigorated for the character for reasons Diggle can sum up satisfactorily. "It's cool the various people that have kind of beaten the character down," the writer says. "I mean, Garth Ennis really beat Constantine down. He kind of turned him into an alcoholic bum, broke his heart and all the rest. But then half the fun of doing that is then watching him climb back up and get back on top of his game afterwards. [Readers have] already noticed the change in [Constantine's] tone and manner and bearing, the way he holds himself, the more polished look, the more confident manner, being slightly more proactive rather than simply responding.

"The main thing that John's trying to do at the moment is just investigating," says Diggle, who plans to spread his initial two-year run out in short arcs and standalone stories―"basically just good old-fashioned horror stories," as he puts it. All the while he'll be quietly threading along undercurrents that will eventually converge into what he calls "life-defining stuff for Constantine." "It's going to address basically the line of Constantines in the world," he explains. "The fact that there have always been Constantines around and they've always been getting mixed up in supernatural shenanigans. I have a reason to explain that that's more than just coincidence, shall we say." Diggle will also clear up what exactly Dalton-Brewer, who has passed on since his encounter with Constantine, was up to and why he had the ability to do what he did, a thread Diggle deliberately left open.

I'm incredibly excited to see John going out and looking for trouble, ready to meet it head on with a wily grin and a trick up his sleeve. I'm ready for the cocky, sarcastic guy in control that Alan Moore first created. "My policy has always been, don't try and second-guess the readers," says Diggle. "Just write the kind of comic I want to read. And I wanted to read that Constantine again because I always liked the guy I read in Swamp Thing."


So if you're into spooky horror stories and badass protagonists, and you've never had a chance to take a bite out of the delicious comic PB and fluff sandwich experience that is John Constantine, then now is a pretty good time to check out Hellblazer.

"Wars and rumors of wars," a phrase from the Bible which is so familiar and today so very real. War is by its nature immoral, sinful and wrong. However, war is sadly necessary at times. As horrible as it is, war, in my view might be justified under the following circumstances.

1. There is a clear and present danger to our freedom and liberty.

2. There is a clear and present danger to national security.

3. There is a clear and present danger to the safety of our children.

According to the famous Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, war is an extension of politics. Some say it is a failure of politics. The truth is when a nation goes to war it should be the total focus of the nation to protect our freedom, our national security, and the safety of that which we love.

In the Ken Burns documentary airing on Louisiana Public Broadcasting it is clear the dichotomy of normal American life when a people predisposed to live and let live must kill to defeat evil. Store clerks became fighter pilots, students became submariners, and farmers became infantrymen.

Regular Americans were called on to sacrifice whatever it took to do what was necessary. Many had to sacrifice everything.

May we pray that war might be avoided. May we also pray for our leaders and our brave defenders who might be called on to boldly go into the dark clouds of war so that we can remain in the light of freedom, liberty, security and safety. If we should go to war may we pray for the strength to defeat evil and defend our values and to do what is necessary. May we also pray for forgiveness when we lack the wisdom to defend these values in any other way.

--

Horrors lost in glitter of souvenirs

Jack McLeod

Shreveport

Uncle Walt was always the kind, understanding uncle; the one you went to when you wanted or needed a hug. As a young boy, I frequently asked my Uncle Walt to tell me about the war. Rising to the rank of sergeant in the U.S. Army, he had served in New Guinea and the Southwest Pacific earning a few medals including the Purple Heart.

When I was 9 and he had too many of his ever present Scotch on the rocks, he put down his Roi Tan and took me down into his basement and pulled out an Army duffle bag.

He removed a rolled up olive green wool blanket which he laid on the ping-pong table. Unrolling the blanket revealed a Japanese flag covered with messages from loved ones written in Japanese characters.

But most impressive to me that day were three Japanese swords ?two of which were still encased in scabbards. The third was stained brown.

He shot the owner of that sword, Uncle Walt told me, after it had been used to behead a captive and the blood had never been washed off.

He only talked with me about that one more time.

On that occasion he informed me that he had sent the souvenirs back to Japan to be given to the families of the soldiers to whom they belonged. He seemed at peace with that.

He took his own life, before I ever got a chance to talk with him about it again.

But if I had, I would have asked him if it was really dried blood or if it was just rust.

As a boy I believed it was blood, but Uncle Walt always liked to joke. Had I looked in his eyes that day in the basement, I would have had my answer.

But I didn't look in his eyes.

I was too fascinated with my uncle, the war hero, rather than my uncle, the young man carried thousands of miles away from home to witness and commit the unthinkable and horrible acts of war.

--

Soldiers would spread out on front porch

Susan Shofner

Shreveport

My grandmother, Frankye Parker, wrote an autobiography in 1985 that she titled "An Ordinary Life." (I typed this book on an old IBM Selectric typewriter ?all 169 pages of it!) It's full of wonderful anecdotes about her life growing up in rural Louisiana and as an educator and wife of a school principal in Sabine and Vernon parishes in the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s. My grandmother passed away in 1988, but my mother, Pat Nelson, who is mentioned in the story, is a retired Caddo Parish teacher and still lives in Shreveport. She also mentions her husband (my grandfather), Earl Parker.

Excerpts from "An Ordinary Life" by Frankye C. Parker:

We moved to Evans, Louisiana, where Earl was to be principal. This was about 1940. The war conditions were getting serious then and teachers were getting scarce. I was asked to start teaching again. Since both of my children were in school, and I was badly needed, I felt it was my patriotic duty to do so. Little did I know that I would teach for the next 27 years!

The Evans Community was near Sabine River Swamp and the army used the swamp as a training ground for troops to be used in World War II. We had all kinds of troops: tanks, horsemen, foot soldiers, pontoon bridge builders across Sabine River, etc.

The road passed in front of the schoolyard and there was a branch road at the side of the schoolyard. The army passed all the time, day and night.

When school was out, they wouldn't break ranks to let the buses get on the road to go home, so Earl (principal of the school) stood right in the middle of the road to stop tanks, horses, or soldiers until the buses got out.

The boys (soldiers) would get under their tanks at night to keep the rain off, and the tanks would sink into the mud and crush them. The horses would get scared crossing the pontoon bridges and toss their riders into the water and drown them, or the horses themselves would fall off the bridges.

A group of Hawaiian soldiers pitched their pup tents between our house and the road once. They were just kids to me.

All the food they had was their canned rations, so we cooked for them. Pat played the piano for them. We had a wide front porch and the soldiers would sprawl on it to listen to her play. ...

The school teachers had to meet at the school and issue the ration stamp books. A single teacher who stayed with us told a bachelor that she needed his shoe stamps. She was just picking at him, or should I say flirting with him. Later he brought it to her at the house, and they started dating and finally married before the year was over.

We could drive just across the river into Texas and buy all the gas we wanted. They were very open with their dealings. Gas rationing and tire rationing surely cut down on the going, and what a place to be isolated in! ...

I promised all the school boys as they were drafted and had to go into service that I would answer every letter they wrote me. Soon I was writing 10 or 12 letters a week to them. They liked to hear from me because I told them all about the school affairs (gossip).

Earl tried to join the service. He was always too old with two children. The government would raise the service age, but he would be a year older and still have two children and couldn't join. Then, since he taught science he was offered high-priced scientific jobs. He thought of taking one, which carried more pay than teaching; but then he decided that since the military was taking so many of the men teachers, that he would do more service to his country by remaining as principal of the school.

--

They really were the greatest generation

Jimmy Sandefur

Shreveport

Tom Brokaw referred to them as the Greatest Generation and he is right. The men and women who fought World War II left a legacy like no other generation before them or since. Individually unremarkable, but collectively great they protected freedom, conquered fascism and ultimately came home and created the boom of babies that became you and me.

As Ken Burns' documentary "The War" premieres this week, it is fitting that we pause to remember these heroes and the remarkable stories they each lived.

All of us have a relative who enlisted and fought in the jungles of the Pacific or the trenches of Europe.

That generation is aging fast; leaving us by the hundreds each day and taking with them countless untold stories of bravery and honor.

My uncle Randal Eugene Dowden was a typical, uneducated "redneck" boy who grew up in the backwoods near Leesville. In 1943 he was 14 years old when he ran away from home to join the Army. I doubt he could write much more than his name as he slipped on a train to Shreveport in the middle of the night to be swept away by history.

He lied about his age so he could "fight Nazis"; and I later asked him how he was able to sign up. His coarse but truthful reply was, "There were two doctors at my enlistment physical. One doctor looked down your throat, one looked up your ass and if they didn't see each other you were a soldier."

And a soldier he became. Uncle Gene was sent to paratrooper school and a year later he participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy with thousands of other nameless kids from the big cities and backwater stumps of America. He never talked much about the war in Europe to me. About all he would say was that he and his buddies were trained to "kill Nazis" and they were successful at it. When I was a teenager Uncle Gene gave me a Nazi SS lapel pin he had taken off a dead German officer in France. "He wasn't much older than me," is all he offered as he handed it over.

My father-in-law, Louis Provenza, grew up in Shreveport and always wanted to be a pilot. He would sit in his backyard on Allen Avenue and make a "pretend" fighter plane from scraps of his father's mattress manufacturing business. He was 19 when he enlisted in the Navy in 1942; and after pilot training in Washington and Florida he was soon steaming to the Pacific to prepare for the invasion of Japan.

Louis was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Langley in Pearl Harbor and piloted a Grumman F6-F Hellcat. He would land that fighter on the deck of a pitching ship in the middle of the night, full of "youth and no fear." He was on that ship when atomic bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, ending the war.

I sat down with him and asked him why he was willing to leave all he had known as a kid, travel halfway around the world and risk injury or death.

"Nothing was given to us in those days. We respected the opportunities that the United States gave us and it was our duty to fight for our country. Our mind-set was that our liberty had been threatened and we were going to fight, and die, to protect it."

My uncle passed away in 2003 and my father in law recently celebrated his 83rd birthday. We are losing more of our best every day. Men like these two who gave themselves to this country without expectation or demand; boys who fought and died in pursuit of such esoteric ideals as honor and liberty.

In August I traveled to Washington, D.C., for a meeting and strolled along the National Mall as the sun set. I came to the World War II Memorial and stood reverently as I scanned the carved marble, forever enshrined with the names of the Great War's battles ?Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Midway, the Bulge. "?br>
An elderly man, an obvious veteran, caught my attention as he hobbled toward a particular quote on the memorial wall. He was assisted by a young man ?his son perhaps ?who steadied him as the older removed his hat and wept openly and without shame.

The three of us read the quote in silence.

"Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices." ?President Harry S. Truman.

The Greatest Generation. Amen.