War & Peace Quote by Mort Walker

Mort Walker’s genius here is the tightrope: he frames survival not as moral triumph, but as professional skill. During Vietnam, comedy wasn’t just entertainment; it was a contested civic space where every punchline got interrogated for allegiance. Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey, is basically describing how a single strip could be read as anti-war critique by one audience and as insider validation by another. That double readability isn’t an accident. It’s the whole mechanism.

The line “thought I was” repeated twice is a quiet flex: he’s less interested in what he intended than in how people projected their needs onto the work. Anti-war readers wanted satire to be indictment, proof that mainstream culture could still bite. Soldiers wanted recognition, a depiction of boredom, bureaucracy, and absurdity that felt true without turning them into villains. Walker’s characters delivered complaints about the Army that could register as subversion from a campus protest lens and as catharsis from inside the barracks. The same joke functions as dissent and as therapy.

“I was on both sides” isn’t fence-sitting so much as an admission that mass culture rarely gets to be pure. Syndicated comics live by broad circulation; they survive by being legible across divides. The final kicker - “and I survived” - lands with a little gallows humor. It acknowledges the era’s cultural minefield and suggests that neutrality wasn’t passive. It was an active, disciplined performance of ambiguity, one that kept the strip running while the country argued about whose pain counted and what criticism was allowed to look like.