Cartoon One:

• The person who supports the war is blindly climbing barely stable stairs to
depict “escalation” while holding a sign that quotes Douglas MacArthur’s military
strategy of “No substitute for victory”. The person who opposes the war has their head in
the dirt (like an Ostrich’s when scared) and their feet on the ground while holding a sign
that preaches American military atonement and pullout.
• The cartoonist seems believes both to be unreasonable. By portraying both
as having flaws (I.E. the supporter’s blind climb on unstable steps and the Ostrich-like
behavior of the opposition), he deems both sides’ approach to have to have massive
flaws.
• A strategy the U.S. might have considered is to mitigate the amount of
troops over time and increase funding for their military or enlist NATO or UN allies for
an American-led peacekeeping mission (much like modern-day Afghanistan).

Catoon Two:
• The hole is most likely from an American bomb and the town looks deeply
devastated, with basic brick structures collapsed.
• The cartoon’s caption and accompanying information differ in the
sacrificial implications behind the definition of “destroy”. Whereas the cartoon depicts
whole countries as entities that need to be “destroyed” to save the whole of Southeast
Asia, the Ben Tre statement indicates that a single town could be saved by destruction,
without serving as a sacrifice for the whole of Southeast Asia.
• The cartoonist is “making the point” that towns are being fundamentally
being sacrificed for their own survival- an example of verbal and historical irony.