THE VIETNAM WAR

Terry Mosher’s editorial cartoons, penned under the name Aislin, have been a fixture of the Montreal Gazette for 50 years. We take a weekly look back at some memorable cartoons in this impressive and vast body of work.

Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on the Vietnam War reminds us that America was sharply divided then, too. I and most of my Montreal acquaintances — my journalist colleagues included — were dead set against the war. That came through in my work.

Vietnam was the first television war and the world was fed daily images of atrocities perpetrated by both sides. It was also the first war in which America became highly critical of itself; it was difficult to portray the conflict in the usual flag-waving fashion.

Because of the guerrilla aspects of the Vietnam War, actual casualties were hard to determine. However, it is acknowledged that well over a million people died during the American chapter of the war, with a minimum of 600,000 of those being civilians.

Richard Nixon claimed that Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War were a noisy minority and that many more Americans supported his policies. He called the latter group the silent majority, but to my mind, this Vietnamese family represented the true silent majority.

The Vietnam War produced no heroes. Only the North Vietnamese revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, emerged with any claim to success. The former South Vietnamese capital of Saigon was renamed in his honour. He was a heavy smoker, so I portrayed him surfing victory waves with a black eye. He’d “rather fight than switch,” an expression made popular by a cigarette commercial of the day.