War Is Boring

“Yesterday we visited one of the biggest tent camps in Port-au-Prince,” Matt Bors writes.

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN United States It has been nearly two years since the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division began allowing straw-purchased guns bought in the United States to “walk” into Mexico, and seven months since the ATF stopped it. The arms trafficking scheme, dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious” after the street racing film franchise, was designed [...]

What should grace the front page of the Shanghai Morning Post today but the Chinese Navy refurbished Soviet aircraft carrier, the former Varyag. Chinese officials officially acknowledged the carrier’s existence this week, but the whole world has known about it for years and it’s on the cusp of entering service, ostensibly in a training role.

Matt Bors is in Haiti recruiting artists for a comics journalism project. Martha Stewart, the homemaker queen and former felon, was also in Haiti “for some photo-ops with poor people and a quick meeting with the president,” Bors wrote. Here they are, eying each other warily.

Artist Tim Hamilton has posted more sample art from our forthcoming comic book about the Congo war. They appear to be scenes from Congo’s Belgian colonization.

China is militarily weaker than many people think, especially compared to America. This, despite lots of showy jet prototypes and plenty of other factory-fresh equipment.

In a storm of dust and noise, the blue-painted helicopter belonging to an anonymous military contractor settled onto the playground-size landing zone of a U.S. Amy outpost in eastern Afghanistan, just a few miles from the border with Pakistan. I tumbled onto the loose gravel and, bowed under the weight of my backpack, body armor and cameras, lurched toward a beckoning sergeant. The Taliban had kept this outpost, just outside the town of Margah in eastern Paktika province, under steady rocket bombardment. We had to get under cover.

One of Matt Bors’ sketches from Haiti. He returns to the U.S. next week.

A photo from a Chinese aerospace exhibit, posted on an Internet forum, provides the first new evidence in more than six months regarding the role and capabilities of China’s first stealth fighter prototype.

Fresh off my collaboration with artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner on “Boom!”, my true story of getting blown up in Afghanistan, I’m now hard at work with artist Tim Hamilton on a book-length comic about the war in Congo.

Cartoonist Ted Rall and I are writing “dueling” columns on the subject of embedded reporting. Ted’s is online at Cartoon Movement.

Matt Bors checks in from Haiti.