Sketches of humanity
‘Doonesbury’ creator Garry Trudeau illustrates troops’ hearts and souls
By Kelly Kennedy
Times staff writer
When Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” debuted in 1970, it featured girls, football and a sprinkling of war protesters.
Since then, the strip has emerged into a political force that has mocked every administration and president from Nixon to Clinton to Bush.
The targets of Trudeau’s scorn have been rendered as inanimate objects — President Bush as a bumbling cowboy hat, President Clinton as a floating waffle and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a giant hand — “der gropenführer.”
Trudeau’s detractors have branded him as an unreconstructed liberal with a political agenda. But although Trudeau may turn political figures into caricatures, the troops he portrays stay human.
From the time “B.D.” first made the scene in strip No. 1 as a college quarterback, he never removed his football helmet, saying his ears stuck out.
In 2004, B.D. went to war as a National Guardsman wearing a Kevlar helmet — and lost a leg in combat. Then, the helmet came off and he began baring his thoughts about the things he had seen and what he was feeling. The strips are filled with dark humor, emotional meetings with former platoon buddies and the new camaraderie that evolves among troops facing the same hurdles.
Last year, Trudeau gathered the B.D. material into a book, “The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time.” All proceeds went to Fisher House, which provides housing for families while service members receive treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and other major military medical centers.
A sequel, “The War Within: One More Step at a Time,” will be published in August, with proceeds going to Fisher House.
The troops who have met him or read his book say he captures the way they feel — that he “gets it” — even if they don’t always agree with his politics.
In a wide-ranging e-mail interview with Army Times, Trudeau discussed his experiences at Walter Reed, his decision to send B.D. to war, his recommended reading for troops and more:
Q. How much time did you spend at Walter Reed?
A. I’ve been there a half-dozen or so times. Initially, I went in under USO [United Service Organizations] auspices, presumably because no one could decide whether I was an entertainer or a journalist. The advantage, of course, is that visits are pre-screened and you’re not imposing on anyone who’d prefer not to see you.
But now my occasional visits are unstructured and low-key. I spend roughly half the time talking to doctors and therapists, the rest with wounded soldiers. I also try to visit families at Fisher House and go to the Friday night dinners that Fran O’Brien’s Steak house hosts gratis for outpatient amputees. [Note: Fran O’Brien’s is closed until the owners find a new location after leaving The Capitol Hilton.]
Q. Do you still visit Walter Reed?
A. Yes. Not as often as I’d like, as the story arc has shifted to vet centers, so that’s my priority at the moment. I’m thinking that eventually B.D. may go back to Walter Reed as a peer visitor, which will allow me to tell stories about soldiers with traumatic brain injuries and other sorts of wounds. I took the peer-visitor training course at the hospital just to see what was involved. There were role-playing exercises involved, and I’m sure the other participants found my performance as an amputee ludicrous, but everyone was kind. And I passed the test. Or so they told me.
Q. Why did you go the first time? Did somebody suggest it, or did you see a news story, or was it something you just wondered about?
A. [Defense Department] public affairs contacted me shortly after the story line began and asked if there was any way the Pentagon could assist. I think they were so concerned I’d screw it up that they concluded it might go better if they offered me complete access. It reminded me of something [President Johnson] once said about co-opting people — it’s better to have them inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
Q. What, from your visits with patients, has stayed with you or made the biggest impression?
A. The same thing that stays with most visitors — the positive mind-set and lack of self-pity. This is a population that tends to view physical injury more as challenge than calamity.
Initially, almost all of them want to return to their units, as unrealistic as that is in most cases.
Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there’s no culture of complaint. Of course, this can be a mixed blessing — it masks a lot of [post-traumatic stress disorder], against which there still remains considerable stigma.
Q. On your Web site, www.doonesbury.com, you say you keep in contact with some of the soldiers. Are any of them from Walter Reed? Do you seek out correspondence with soldiers? What kind of feedback do you get from them?
A. I regularly give out my contact info to soldiers, but I only occasionally get updates from soldiers after they leave WRAMC, understandably.
They want to get on with their lives.
Q. Some of your recent strips seem a bit sentimental. Is this work — the characters since the war began — different for you from previous strips?
A. I hope you don’t really mean sentimental. I’ve tried to make the strips about B.D.’s ordeal as tough-minded as possible. Of course, I’m covering a great deal of emotional terrain with his story, so I guess in that sense it’s something of a departure.
Q. How did the idea occur to you for B.D. to lose a limb? And why B.D.?
A. He was available. It was at a time when U.S. troops were taking heavy casualties, and I wanted the strip to reflect the sacrifices that our countrymen were making.
Q. People constantly talk in this war about the difference between supporting the troops and supporting the war. How do you strike that balance? Nothing’s sacred politically, yet the troops are presented as real and human — even when they’re cocky or underinformed. Is that something you do intentionally?
A. I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with.
The characters are no longer the archetypes they were when I was first starting out and needed them as tent poles. (Only Duke is free of ambivalence, content to live the binary life, asking only, “Is this in my self-interest or not?”) In the B.D. story, I’ve intentionally left the politics out. I don’t want to give readers any reason for turning away, for dismissing the story because of some inferred agenda. In any event, it’s not exactly a secret to regular readers what my views on the war are.
But you’re right about much of the country being caught in a kind of riptide. How do you support troops if you’re in doubt about what they’re doing? I don’t know how long we can stand that kind of cognitive chaos.
Q. Have you been to Iraq or Afghanistan?
A. No. My main exposure to the Army in the field was as an embed at Camp Thunder Rock in Kuwait right after [Operation] Desert Storm [in 1991].
Q. I’ve heard soldiers and former soldiers say you relate well to the troops in Iraq now. What kind of research have you done to get it right — not just the facts but the language and issues of those serving?
A. Well, apart from surfing [military blogs] and talking to veterans, I research stories the same way I always have — by marinating in the journalism produced by my betters. If you look for it, there is a great deal of first-rate, detailed reporting about our troops.
Q. What or who would you recommend for service members?
A. [The] two best books on [the] Iraq war so far seem to be “The Assassins’ Gate” [by George Packer] and “Cobra II” [by Michael R. Gordon and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor].
Q. Have your children affected the way you write?
A. I don’t think so, but it’s always in the back of my mind that many of the soldiers being wounded and killed in Iraq are about the same age as my kids. My godson is going over soon, so the war’s about to get personal for me.
Q. What is his rank and job? What, if any, conversations have the two of you had about the war?
A. He’s a Ranger [lieutenant] leaving for first posting in Europe … then likely on to Iraq or Afghanistan. Interestingly, he opposes the war in Iraq — and did when he joined — but we don’t discuss it anymore. We only talk about his training, of which he has mostly good things to say.
Kelly Kennedy covers the Army.