Medics, themselves wounded, assisted the worse off. Mauldin’s shoeless feet slipped on the bloody floor. Wounded men staggered toward the infirmary, which looked like a slaughterhouse. The two-block camp street was lined with destroyed and riddled hooches. When the barrage let up, soldiers appeared and helped Mauldin carry Prindle to the battalion infirmary. It was an awkward moment for the agnostic cartoonist who, if he prayed at all, addressed it “To Whom It May Concern.” Then he asked Mauldin to hold his hand as he said The Lord’s Prayer. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to die in a minute,” Prindle said. The mortar, which had exploded just outside Prindle’s hooch, had hit him in the abdomen while killing his two bunkmates, one on either side. Mauldin led the soldier to his cot and examined the wound. Blinkered by the drumming barrage, he was about to head down into the sandbagged dugout when a young soldier named Harry Prindle, a clerk typist, approached him, covered in blood. Mauldin, barefoot and in his underwear, instinctively did as ordered. “Get to the bunker!” roared Hughes before dashing out to take command of his battalion. Incoming 80mm mortars rained down around his hooch. That night, shortly before 2:00 a.m., Mauldin awoke with a start. Hughes insisted that the cartoonist take a vacant cot in his hooch at the southern end of the base. In deference to Bill Mauldin’s fame and age (he was 43), battalion commander Lt. Now, Bruce was a helicopter pilot with the 52nd Aviation Battalion at Pleiku. Mauldin was in the Army with the 45th Division in Sicily. He wanted to visit his oldest son, Bruce, who had been born in 1943 while Sgt. On February 7, after a few days taking notes and making sketches in and around Saigon, Mauldin hitched a helicopter ride north to Camp Holloway near Pleiku in the Central Highlands.

No one, including Mauldin, could have guessed just how ferocious his flashback to war would be. In anticipation, 275 newspapers in the Sun-Times’ syndicate ran old Willie and Joe cartoons from 19. Headlines and billboards trumpeted the news: “Bill Mauldin Invades Vietnam!” and “Bill Mauldin Goes Up Front Again!” When famed World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin took off for Vietnam in early 1965, the Chicago Sun-Times pulled out all the stops in promoting its two-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s return to war. BY TODD DePASTINO, IMAGES COURTESY OF THE PRITZKER MILITARY MUSEUM & LIBRARY

Bill mauldin a life up front