OK, gloves off. CP’s Rennie Harris puppeteer cover is straight out of the Big Book Of Alt-Weekly Arts Cover Cliches, though the bordello-red tones ARE gorgeous. That’s compared only to itself, when you put it next to PW’s double amputee Iraq vet shocker, CP looks like the wop who brought a knife to a gun fight with Sean Connery in The Untouchables. It’s a hard slog for city-based alt-weekly to telescope their mandate into national stories like the abattoir Iraq, but returning local vets are the most obvious entree into the war beat and PW’s Cassidy Hartmann has found a local vet named Pisey Tan with a bio that has it all: War and peace, duty and honor, slavery and freedom, immigration and double amputation. Son of an off-the-boat Cambodian women who fled the killing fields of the dreaded Khmer Rouge for America, just 20 years old and four months pregnant with Tan, eventually settling in Olney. Fast forward to a year and a half ago, when an IED disemboweled the Bradley Fighting Vehicle Tan was riding in. Three days later he woke up in the ICU at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in D.C. alone and legless, one of the 2,000 Iraq vets that will live out the rest of their days as double amputees — with no regrets. Shit. Peace be upon him. Peace be upon us all.
WINNER: PW