It's so dark and cynical that it ends in a massive anticlimax. Our anti-heroes get the shit kicked out of them by a hit squad and are saved by a deus ex machina. They didn't solve the bigger problem. They didn't kill or expose the real baddies. Six issues of tension and carnage behind enemy lines in the Vietnam War end up fizzling out. The American officers sending Frank Castle on a murder mission wanted to kill men on their own side to cover their arses and keep their heroin smuggling operation secret. As far as I can tell, this succeeds. The innocent are killed and the guilty get off scot-free. We knew that Nick Fury and the Punisher weren't boy scouts, but even so they're making some extremely dirty choices because they're in love with war.

...until many decades later and the "mischief" of an old enemy. There's no confirmation of what ultimately happened there, but it looks a lot as if the book's two famous anti-heroes end up being shown as ineffectual (they got their arses kicked) and even more morally compromised than we already knew they were. Which is saying a lot for even Nick Fury, let alone the Punisher.

This is disconcerting, to say the least. It took me a while to gather my thoughts... but I like it. It's certainly not out of character for Garth Ennis. Besides, he's written so many comics with these two characters during the Vietnam War that a chronological reread would turn this into just the latest chapter in a journey through hell. It's a sequel to the Vietnam chapters of Fury: My War Gone By and you could cover almost fifty years of unpleasant real history with this reading order:

1943 = Fury: Peacemaker (2006, six issues), with Nick Fury during World War II.

1954 = Fury: My War Gone By issues 1-3 (2012), with Nick Fury working for the U.S. military in French Indochina.

1960 = Punisher: The Tyger (2006, one issue), if you wanted, although that one doesn't examine any real wars or history. Instead, it's about a ten-year-old Frank Castle.

1961 = Fury: My War Gone By issues 4-6 (2012), with Fury trying to help assassinate Fidel Castro.

1968-71 = four-ish visits so far to the Vietnam war, with (in order) Punisher: The Platoon, Fury: My War Gone By issues 7-9, Get Fury (i.e. what I'm reviewing here) and The Punisher: Born. There's also a closely related fifth. Garth Ennis's The Punisher MAX ends on a story arc that's set in the present day but talking about Vietnam (Valley Forge, Valley Forge, issues 55-60).

1984 = Fury: My War Gone By issues 10-12, with Nick Fury meeting Barracuda in Nicaragua.

1987 = the Afghanistan flashbacks of The Punisher: Soviet (2019), although those don't feature either Fury or Castle. That was the USSR's self-damaging and completely unnecessary war, not America's. (It's sometimes called "the Soviet Union's Vietnam".)

Modern = there's a ton of these, but I only mention them for completeness. You'd probably want to finish things off with the 13th issue of Fury: My War Gone By, but there's nothing historical about Ennis's main Punisher series, its Barracuda spin-off, Fury MAX and, if you wanted a post-apocalyptic dark fable about the end of mankind, The Punisher: The End.

Here, Nick Fury's been captured and Frank Castle gets sent to kill him before the Vietnamese torture his military secrets out of him. They can break anyone, even Nick Fury. It's only a matter of time. He's in the notorious prison known to American POWs as the "Hanoi Hilton". Castle also attempts something he's massively unsuited to, i.e. infiltrating Vietnam's capital city and moving around without getting shot on sight. "How does a six foot four brick wall of a Caucasian hide in a city full of Asians half his size?"

It's gruesomely violent. Frank Castle lives up to his future billing as the Punisher. It's clear-eyed about the atrocities inflicted by both sides. The ending's defying war story heroic norms to such a degree that you could probably call it subversive, but I can respect that. This is the kind of war story we need today.