One of my favourite Sgt Rock mini-epics is when Rock visits the CBI (China Burma India) theatre of war in OAAW # 256 - 259 (April to August 1973). I feel that the new locale elevates the level of Kanigher's writing (and brings with it, beautiful, evocative Russ Heath art).
Issue # 259 reads like an anti-war tale, Rock expresses attitudes most unlike a WWII US army sergeant, because he understands what the men on a hospital ship have been through, they don't want to fight anymore (Rock is picked up out to the sea by the hospital ship, whose surviving soldiers want to save people not kill them).
Rock doesn't judge their pacifist attitudes, he knows they've earned the right to make their own decisions. It's a really powerful piece of writing. I don't know if Kanigher could have written this story in the social climate of 1963 but in 1973, with a different set of social, anti-war attitudes voiced by anti-Vietnam 60s youth influencing the way many comic readers would have seen things, perhaps the time was right for this type of story.
I should say it ends traditionally enough but overall the story still has a deeper impact than most. Just a great issue of OAAW:).
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