Book Review: “Terminal Lance: The White Donkey – A Powerful Graphic Novel on Military Life, War, and PTSD”
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A STORY THAT LINGERS LIKE A GHOST
There’s a peculiar weight to Terminal Lance: The White Donkey, a weight that doesn’t announce itself in the way war stories usually do. This isn’t the weight of glory, of flags rippling in the wind, of a nation’s gratitude laid upon the shoulders of a soldier returning home.
No, this is something quieter. Heavier. The kind of weight that doesn’t leave visible scars but seeps into the marrow, settling where no one can see it. A weight that follows you off the battlefield, through airport terminals, into your old bedroom, onto the barstool where your friends don’t quite understand why you’re quiet now.
Maximilian Uriarte doesn’t tell a war story in the traditional sense. There are no grand battles, no cinematic heroics. Instead, through the disillusioned eyes of Abe, a young Marine navigating the soul-crushing monotony of military life, The White Donkey explores something far more insidious: the chasm between expectation and reality—the relentless march toward war and the even more uncertain road home.
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the art of emptiness
Uriarte’s artistic choices mirror the emotional detachment of his protagonist. The panels are sparse, conversations clipped, silences stretched long enough to become deafening. There is a haunting poetry in this restraint. The simplicity of the visual style forces the reader to sit with the story’s emotions, unfiltered and raw. Every line drawn, every word spoken, carries more than what is seen or said.
This is not a graphic novel that shouts; it is one that echoes.
Throughout the book, the white donkey itself becomes a surreal, unspoken presence—an omen, a dream, a hallucination. It appears in Iraq, in memory, in moments of despair, a silent witness to the things Abe cannot say aloud. Its meaning is left deliberately ambiguous, yet it is ever-present, a reminder that not everything broken can be neatly explained or fixed.
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The white donkey: a symbol of a specter
War stories often dwell in extremes—adrenaline and violence, brotherhood and sacrifice—but The White Donkey exists in the liminal spaces between. The donkey itself, a surreal and recurring presence, represents everything Abe cannot articulate: his confusion, his fear, his disconnection.
The donkey is both a guide and a ghost, an anchor to something Abe cannot escape. It embodies the unspoken, the weight of war that does not disappear when the deployment ends.
Uriarte offers no easy explanations for the donkey, nor does he tie its meaning into a neat resolution. Like war itself, its presence is enigmatic, unsettling, and deeply personal to those who have experienced its reality.
The donkey first appears in Iraq, an impossible creature in an impossible place. It does not belong, and yet it is there. Just as Abe, barely tethered to his own sense of purpose, barely understands why he is there. Uriarte presents these moments as surreal, drifting between reality and something more dreamlike—too real to be a hallucination, too strange to be ignored.
The donkey does not move. It does not speak. But it does not leave.
Abe, like so many before him, has been taught to compartmentalize, to survive through detachment. But the donkey exists outside of that, embodying something he cannot explain or control. Is it fear? Guilt? The slow unraveling of a mind caught between war and the self? The answer is never clear, and that is precisely the point.
War does not end just because the deployment does. That is the great lie—the idea that a plane ticket home, a DD-214, a return to normalcy, erases what came before. Abe’s homecoming is not a triumphant return, nor is it a tragic fall. It is worse: it is nothing.
He steps back into a world that no longer fits. His friends, his family, the streets that should be familiar—all of it feels distant. And then, in the middle of this sterile, civilian existence, the donkey appears again.
It is not a memory. It is not a dream.
It simply is.
And that is what makes it terrifying.
The donkey’s presence in Abe’s civilian life underscores the inescapable nature of war. Trauma does not respect geography. It does not stay behind in the desert. It follows, creeping into the quiet moments, appearing in places where it does not belong, just as Abe himself no longer seems to belong.
When the story reaches its breaking point, it is not a grand climax. There is no battlefield, no enemy, no explosion to mark the moment when everything comes apart. There is only Abe, and there is the donkey.
A confrontation, but not a resolution.
The donkey is neither friend nor foe, neither answer nor question. It is simply there, just as it always has been. And in that moment, the weight of everything Abe has been holding crashes down. The war, the loss, the disconnection, the raw and unspoken things that words cannot fix. Uriarte does not offer closure because there is none to give.
Abe is not “cured.” He is not “better.”
But he is forced to look at what haunts him. To acknowledge it. To understand, perhaps, that it will never fully leave.
Just like the donkey.
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the fight that never ends
One of The White Donkey’s most poignant truths is the impossibility of standing still in a world that demands motion. War is movement—deployments, patrols, orders barked and executed without hesitation. And yet, paradoxically, home is also motion—a forward march into a civilian life that no longer fits.
Abe’s return is not marked by relief, but by an absence of purpose. The structured world of the Marines, the only thing that made sense, is gone. The war exists only in his mind now, and no one understands that the fight isn’t over just because he’s home.
This is where The White Donkey delivers its most painful truth:
Moving past war isn’t about leaving it behind—it’s about learning how to carry it differently.
Abe enlists believing that war will make him whole. He is searching for something—structure, purpose, clarity—but what he finds is monotony. The version of war he imagined is nowhere to be seen. Instead, there are endless formations, patrols that lead nowhere, orders that make little sense beyond the chain of command. He does not feel like a warrior. He does not feel like a hero. He simply is.
Uriarte captures the reality that most war stories leave out: the waiting. The endless, mind-numbing passage of time between moments of fear or violence. The sheer weight of boredom pressing down on those who signed up for action, who thought that service would give their lives direction. Instead, war becomes movement without momentum—a cycle of repetition that does not push Abe forward, but slowly wears him down.
When Abe comes home, the world has not stopped. It moves on, unaware that something fundamental inside him has shifted. But while the world is still in motion, he is not.
Uriarte frames Abe’s return through quiet, mundane moments that cut deeper than any battlefield scene. A gas station at night. A television flickering in a room where no one is watching. Conversations that feel like echoes of something that once mattered but no longer does. His body is present, but he is elsewhere, trapped in the liminal space between the life he left and the one waiting for him.
There is no parade. No catharsis. No moment where everything suddenly makes sense. Just the stark realization that home does not feel like home anymore. That he does not fit the way he once did. That perhaps he never will.
Then there is the donkey. Always there, always silent.
It appears in Iraq, an omen with no explanation. It appears at home, long after the war has been left behind. It does not belong, just as Abe no longer belongs.
Uriarte never spells out its meaning, and that is the point. The donkey is trauma, regret, disillusionment—it is every unspoken weight that Abe carries, the thing that lingers long after the uniform is folded away. Civilians do not see it, do not feel it, but it follows him nonetheless. It is not something that can be discarded or escaped. It is something that must be carried, something that settles deep into the bones, something that refuses to let go.
Because war does not end when the fighting stops. It does not stay confined to the desert or the barracks. It stays with those who lived it, in memories, in dreams, in the quiet spaces where no one is watching. It becomes part of them, just as the donkey becomes part of Abe. A presence that does not explain itself. A burden that does not lift. A war that never really ends.
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war without glorification
There is no romanticism in Terminal Lance: The White Donkey. No sweeping declarations of patriotism, no blind condemnation of war, no Hollywood arc of redemption. Instead, Uriarte delivers an unflinching look at the fractures war leaves behind, the weight of expectation, and the quiet, often impossible work of learning how to exist beyond the battlefield.
Like the donkey itself, the story lingers—unspoken but understood, silent yet insistent. It does not ask for answers, only recognition. And perhaps, in that recognition, the first step toward something like healing.
Abe enlists searching for meaning. Maybe he doesn’t say it out loud, maybe he doesn’t even fully understand it himself, but it’s there—this idea that war will give him something he doesn’t yet have, something solid, something real. That it will define him.
But there is no defining moment.
What he finds is monotony. A life measured in formations and inspections, in pointless patrols through landscapes that seem to stretch forever. He is not tested. He is not broken and reforged into something greater. He simply moves through the motions of war without ever touching the purpose he thought he would find.
And what fills the space where that purpose was supposed to be? Not resolve. Not pride. Just emptiness. A quiet, creeping realization that there is no grand lesson to be learned, no cinematic transformation waiting on the other side of his deployment. Uriarte refuses to romanticize military service because, for many, there is nothing romantic about it. The great revelation that Abe was waiting for never comes.
And then there is the donkey. Always present. Always watching.
It appears without explanation, without purpose, much like the weight Abe cannot put into words. It is not a sign, not a prophecy, not an answer to a question he has yet to ask. It simply is.
Like trauma, like grief, like memory, it does not need a reason to exist.
The brilliance of the donkey’s presence is in its refusal to be defined. Just as war leaves no single mark on those who experience it, just as PTSD does not manifest in neat, understandable ways, the donkey’s meaning is never pinned down. It follows Abe across continents, across realities, across the invisible lines between past and present, war and home. Because the things that damage us do not stay in one place. They do not obey borders or logic. They linger. They wait. They exist in the periphery, always.
And when Abe returns, the war follows.
He is back in a world that is familiar in shape but foreign in feeling. His family, his friends, the streets he used to know—they have not changed, and that is the problem. He has.
But no one sees it. No one understands why he does not laugh in the same places, why his answers are shorter, why the space between one breath and the next feels heavier than before. The expectation is that he will slip back into the life he left, unchanged, or at least grateful to be home. But how do you explain to someone that you are no longer the person they remember? That something inside you has shifted, fractured, and that you do not yet know how to put it back together?
Uriarte does not offer resolution, because there is none to give. No great healing, no triumphant moment of reintegration. Just a man and his war, still carried, still present, still quietly reshaping the world around him in ways that no one else can see.
Because the truth is, war does not leave those who live it. It does not stay where it belongs. It moves. It lingers. It waits.
Just like the white donkey.
📢 Discussion: What Did The White Donkey Mean to You?
Have you read Terminal Lance: The White Donkey? What moments resonated with you the most? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
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