(1) Continuing this week's Doonesbury story line about who exactly fights our "volunteer" wars, and (2) looking back at B.D.'s "long road home"

(1) CONTINUING THIS WEEK'S STORY LINE

Earlier this week, we saw the Rev. Scot Sloan, longtime Walden College social activist, enlisting old acquaintance and current Walden football coach B.D. to talk to his ethics class, which is filled with students who are all gung-ho for the Iraq war--except when it comes to actually fighting in it. B.D., a veteran of Vietnam and both Gulf wars, lost a leg in the current one.

Here are the rest of this week's strips (click on them to enlarge):

THURSDAYFRIDAYSATURDAY

(2) B.D.'s "LONG ROAD HOME"

When I wrote recently about Gene Weingarten's terrific Washington Post interview with Garry Trudeau, the subject that came up most frequently was the extraordinary recurring series that Trudeau has been doing since 2004, highlighted by the stunning strip of April 21, 2004, when one of the strip's original characters, onetime star quarterback and now Walden coach B.D., was almost killed fighting in Iraq--and wound up losing a leg.

Trudeau has returned to the story frequently for a week or two at a time, tracing B.D.'s initial recuperation; his family's struggle to cope without him; his return to the States and reunion with his wife, Boopsie, and their daughter, Sam (and of course their live-in nanny, former tanning champion Zonker Harris); his physical rehabilitation and return home; and, by far most arduous, his almost unbearably difficult return to something like normal emotional function, which began when--with the greatest reluctance--he made contact with the support staff at his local V.A. center.

Trudeau has explained that following publication of the strips depicting B.D.'s wounding, someone in the Pentagon reached out to him, offering assistance in exploring the world of the returned vets, and he wound up immersing himself in it. As a result, he has not only brought those of us with no other experience of this world into it, but has provided a sounding board, helping hand and forum for the vets themselves and their loved ones--and for other victims of profound emotional trauma as well. From the ongoing sampling of mail that's been published on the Doonesbury website (in the "Blowback" section), it's clear that countless damaged vets and their families have not only been able to identify with B.D. and his family but have been moved to seek help, looking for a counselor like B.D.'s Elias.

Astoundingly, Trudeau has been able to make most of these strips not only seriously moving but seriously funny, often hilarious. (The others, like the harrowing sequence with Elias in which B.D. finally dredged up his worst memory of Iraq, weren't intended to be funny.) Clearly, one of the keys has been that we know these characters so well, and there's so much in them for Trudeau to play with--like letting us finally see B.D. without his helmet (and eventually find out how he became so attached to it). And then, he's added wonderful characters like the V.A. center receptionist Celeste and of course Elias.

I mentioned when I wrote about the Washington Post Trudeau interview that my previous posts on the subject of Doonesbury seemed to arouse no interest "and often startling hostility." What I didn't mention was that I had been so shaken by a couple of truly savage comments that I deleted an entire post. It wasn't till later that I realized that the deleted post was the one in which I had written specifically about the B.D. odyssey. Once that was deleted, as I discovered when I went looking in the DWT archives, no earlier trace remained here of that subject.

I've come to understand that there are bands of knuckle-draggers out there with a viscerally psychotic hatred for Doonesbury. It's probably sort of like what we on this side of the political spectrum feel for Rush Limbaugh--the difference being that Doonesbury is intelligent, sensitive, funny and usually strikingly insightful, while Rush Limbaugh is a pile of raging, imbecilic, useless, life-destroying toxic waste, mortal enemy of human decency in every form.

The irony is that my particular wingnuts were apparently even dumber-than-usual Net-stalkers, mental primitives whose store of "knowledge" is exhausted at "Doonesbury = liberal = boo! hate! kill!"

Because, in fact, the B.D. saga has, for reasons that should be obvious, reached across ideological lines, at least among people who are actually concerned about American veterans. This is not to be confused with the mindless right-wing platitudinizers who fetishistically screech their hysterical and mostly empty "support for our troops." The truth is that your average right-wing blowhard--all mouth and no brain--doesn't give a flying farandole about those troops, as witness the brutal lack of support our phony "patriots" allow our government to provide them, and especially the grotesquely inadequate treatment accorded veterans, notably the ones who come back from their service broken in mind or body or both.

The most startling revelation in the Trudeau interview came, not from Mr. Trudeau, but from Mrs. Trudeau. Jane Pauley agreed to talk to Weingarten about a subject that her husband mostly wouldn't: her own struggle with a difficult-to-diagnose bipolar condition several years ago which she understood only too well had stretched her family to its limits. With the support of her husband and three children, along with lithium and therapy, she got her life back.

The B.D. story is something special, she told Weingarten--the best work Trudeau has ever done. This can hardly have surprised him. After all, what Trudeau fan doesn't think so? However, she clearly startled him when she said, "I don't think he's consciously aware that it has anything to do with me." She went on to explain: "Garry's mind is very compartmentalized. The department doing the strip in his brain is not directly connected to the husband part, but it defies credulity that on some level it is not present in his work. What is he writing about, really? He's writing about mental illness, and how it's possible to find a way out of it, with help. It's very hopeful."

Trudeau has published two volumes of the B.D. saga: The Long Road Home and The War Within. He's donating his share to Fisher House, which provides housing for the families of loved ones receiving treatment in major military and V.A. medical centers. (When B.D. was returned stateside, his wife and daughter stayed in Fisher House housing.)

What we have here are just a few samples of the B.D. strips. They aren't necessarily my favorites, but they're good, representative ones that I happened to find online and remember fondly (again, click to enlarge):

Old pal Ray, who saved B.D.'s life, waits after his amputation.
Homecoming--with daughter Sam, nanny Zonker, wife Boopsie
B.D. goes outside for his first session with V.A. counselor Elias.