NCS Cartoonists USO Trip- Prelude

A Little Background

Last October eight Cartoonists from the National Cartoonists Society went on a trip to Landstuhl, Germany with a stop in Washington DC to visit wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, the Bathesda Naval Medical Center, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and the Ramstien Air Force Base terminal and staging facility. You can read all about that trip here and here. The cartoonists were NCS president Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Jeff Bacon (Naval Times/Broadside), Bruce Higdon (Army cartoonist), Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues), Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm), Chip Bok (editorial cartoonist), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) and myself. The entire trip was funded privately and the USO was involved mainly for organization and activity planning.

The success of that trip and the responses of the soldiers and staff when meet with was not overlooked by the USO, who then fully sponsored a second trip to the same area with a (mostly) different group of NCS cartoonists. The original group (plus the additions of Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) and Michael Ramirez (editorial cartoonist)) eventually were part of a longer, more involved trip back to Washington DC and Landstuhl, but then continuing on “Down Range” to Kuwait and then into the active war zones in Iraq. We just completed that trip on Saturday.

During our journey we were not able to say where we were exactly nor post pictures until the USO cleared them, so that severely limited how much I could blog or share on the trip. Now that we are back, I will be chronicling our trip in detail over the next several days on the following schedule:

Tuesday: Washington DC / Landstuhl, Germany
Thursday: Kuwait
Friday: Iraq

These posts will be long and involved so I apologize in advance if I bore the hell out of anyone. Feel free to move on to blogs showing cheeseburger loving cats at will.

Tune in tomorrow.