CAMP VICTORY, Iraq — Army Master Sgt. Steve Opet finds humor in war.
He finds it in hardship endured by his comrades. He sees it in the stringent rules that dictate a soldier’s life in Iraq. He hears it in conversations between officers and enlisted personnel.
And for nearly 15 months, he has chronicled all of it in “Opet’s Odyssey” — cartoons that lampoon the sometimes humorous, sometimes inane side of military life in Iraq.
“Let’s face it, I’m in the Army,” Opet, 54, of Weirton, W.Va., said during an interview from this sprawling base on the outskirts of Baghdad. “And sometimes, funny stuff happens.”
Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, there have been a number of soldiers who chronicled their experiences in cartoon. But few appear to have become as popular as Opet — whose work is published online and in the Mountain View base newspaper — or earned a following of comrades.
Some of the cartoons are inspired by what Opet has seen. Others, he said, are based on things he has heard. An Army Reserve soldier with the 354th Military Public Affairs unit attached to the 10th Mountain Division, Opet has found inspiration for some of his work from the late Bill Mauldin, who became the voice of the World War II infantry soldier with his characters Willie and Joe.
In one of his first cartoons in Iraq, Opet paid tribute to a memorable Mauldin cartoon that featured a sergeant shooting a jeep with a broken axle, a mishap that bedeviled many a soldier during WWII. In Opet’s updated version, the sergeant, drawn to near likeness, is shooting a computer that reads “access denied.”
With only days left before he returns to West Virginia, open boxes filled with colored pens sit beneath the desk where he has been toying with farewell panels. He said he hasn’t come up with an idea yet. When Opet leaves, he said he’ll return to life as a “serious artist” — a life where he previously won juried shows for his pen-and-ink portraits.
