Book Review: Dougie’s War, by Rodge Glass

Aug 26 2011 by Gregor White, Stirling Observer Friday

Dougie’s War, by Rodge GlassPublished by Freight, £14.95

BASED on accounts from several different sources this graphic novel is a stark account of a life blighted by post traumatic stress disorder.

Dougie is a Scottish soldier fresh home from a tour of duty in Afghanistan and discharged from the army following injury.

On the surface everything’s dandy.

All his old pals are pleased to see him home, happy to stand him a drink and listen to his tales of what a great time he had on the front line - “I showed them right enough”.

Behind the bravado, though, he’s literally haunted by his experiences, more than once quaking in the face of terrifying visions of armed and fork-tongued natives.

None of which are quite as frightening as his alternative vision, of his dead comrades coming back to take him with them.

Dougie is weighed down by survivor’s guilt and a sense of drift as a trained soldier struggling to cope in a civilian world full of endless form-filling and little in the way of real help or understanding.

All around him there are those with their own views on the conflict and even what it is to be a soldier, and news reports pursue him wherever he goes, talking about the brave dead and the respect paid to them - in sharp contrast to his own experience as the one who lived.

The tragic ending is never really in doubt, but when it comes it still packs a fairly hefty wallop.

Author Rodge Glass’s script is spare and to the point, giving Dougie a largely authentic sounding voice whether in dialogue or boxed-off thoughts.

Bearing in mind the form he’s working in here he also clearly knows when words aren’t necessary and artist Dave Turbitt’s deceptively simple sketchlike drawings can be allowed to simply speak for themselves - which they do most eloquently and powerfully, and with a great cinematic quality.

If it’s a bit didactic over all that feeling is only reinforced by the extended article that follows, with its descriptions of real life armed forces experiences, and then the extracts from late 70s/ early 80s comic strip Tommy’s War about life in the First World War trenches that inspired this modern day story.

Taken all together it makes the work feel like something prepared as a school resource pack, but that shouldn’t stop even already well-informed adult audiences from finding much to provoke and stimulate.