Doonesbury Goes to War

In the case of B.D. suffering this grievous wound, I went down to Walter Reed hospital, in Washington, D.C., to talk to some of the amputees. It's important to me to get the details of his recovery right. There's a great deal of pain on Ward 57, where the amputees are sent. Most of the soldiers will admit to having bad days when they feel overwhelmed -- either by their physical pain or by the hard work of looking at themselves in a new way. But it's not as depressing as you might think. In fact, it's uplifting and inspirational. Part of it has to do with the fact that these guys are wrapped in a culture that is very positive, very can-do. Their whole mind-set is: This is a problem I can overcome. Almost all of them want to return to their units, which is a fascinating response to the crisis they're undergoing.

That's one of the first things you have B.D. say when he wakes up in the hospital -- that he wants to get back to his unit.

The soldiers I met in Ward 57 feel guilt about being away from their unit -- but mostly I think they feel great affection for their fellow warriors. I spoke with an MP in her late twenties who was tasked to defend an Iraqi police station. She was up on the roof, which was stacked with sandbags, and she took two RPG rounds, one of which blew off her hand and part of her forearm. She tells this story almost matter-of-factly, as if it had happened to someone else, and with a great deal of feeling about the response of her fellow soldiers. They came and pulled her out of the sand, took her down below and put her on the hood of a Hummer. Then her sergeant and another trooper went back up to the roof to recover her hand. They fished around in the sand until they found it, and they pulled off her wedding ring. She tells this story with tremendous pride and affection for these people -- that they would do something so important to her. She says, "I know it's just a ring, but it meant a lot to me." She's in this terrible situation, and yet in it she finds something to be grateful for.

Some writers regard their fictional characters almost as real people. But you don't seem very broken up about blowing B.D.'s leg off.

Well, the terrible truth about writers is, they create characters and then they put them in harm's way. That's what drama is about. As a writer, I don't have an emotional link to the characters. I have to summon them up -- I have to pull them out of the toolbox and put 'em to work. They don't live in my head. So I was overwhelmed by some of the letters that came in about B.D. It was so emotional. People wrote that it made them feel they had a personal stake in the war -- like someone they knew had been harmed. People were even more astonished when B.D.'s helmet came off. It signified his vulnerability and made it all the more difficult for them to accept. I was talking to a soldier in the hospital, and I said, "I draw this comic strip, and I have this character named B.D. who lost his leg." The soldier's eyes widened: "B.D. lost his leg?!" Here's this mangled, broken hero lying in his bed, and he's concerned that this character he knows had such a terrible thing happen to him. It was very moving.

Do you see parallels between Iraq and Vietnam?