The 2009 NCS Cartoonist USO Tour band members:

Our 8 day USO tour began at a Washington DC area hotel on Wednesday, October 14th where most of our band met, had a quick dinner and talked about our upcoming odyssey. As usual I had a job I had to finish up that kept me working in the hotel room until 4 a.m., so I was already exhausted when we boarded a USO bus on Thursday morning to go to the Bathesda Naval Hospital and then to Walter Reed for our first visits with wounded soldiers. This part of the trip was familiar to us, as we had done the same thing almost exactly a year earlier.

Thursday, October 15th:

The Band at Bathesda Naval Hospital

Bathesda is best known as the primary center for brain related injuries, but they treat almost any kind of injury from damaged limbs from explosions to gunshot wounds. Touring these wards is particularly heart wrenching. We visit the soldiers right in their hospital rooms and they are in various stages of recovery and treatment. Sometimes they are very cognizant and lucid, and other times they are so deep under pain medication that they are hard to communicate with. Most of the soldiers we visited with were surrounded by their family members and were in the midst of or almost done with their treatments.
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Here’s a link to a news story in the Stars and Stripes about our visit to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany prior to our shipping out to do more of the same in the Persian Gulf. There are a number of pictures. The polish soldier in the pictures really did laugh so hard we thought he was going to keel over after I showed him my caricature of him. I haven’t killed a subject yet… although a few have thrown up and one peed their pants once. Fortunately the guy didn’t die but he might need fresh stitches.

Did this sketch on the bus in Germany…

Our day at the National Naval Medical Center and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center got cut short because our flight out to Europe left at 6:30 p.m. that night from Dulles. So the six of us were whisked to the airport and boarded our flight on United, headed to London’s Heathrow airport. There we had a two hour wait until our Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt departed. We landed at the Frankfurt airport at about 11:30 a.m. local time, which was 5:30 a.m. Washington time.

A lot went on with our group during our travels, and during what little free time we had on the trip. I’m not going to go into those stories here or it would take hours to read this post. I’d like to concentrate just on the sequence of events and spend the time describing the area and the facilities and people we met. Sorry… it all makes for some great stories but this is going to be long enough.

At the airport we met up with the USO Europe folks who would be our escorts and guides during our time in Germany. A USO rep brought us through the airport to the USO center… a large trailer in the pickup area of the airport. Here we hooked up with Mike Peters and Chip Bok, both of whom had been traveling together with their wives and others in France and flew in earlier that morning for this part of the tour.

I’ve got to take a quick second to describe the dynamic of this group of cartoonists. Traveling with people you do not know well can sometimes be a trying series of misadventures. This could not have been farther from the case here. I had met some of these folks before, some briefly and some for a little bit longer, but some I had basically never met at all. Despite that, it was like getting together with a bunch of brothers or longtime friends you just hadn’t seen in a few months. We all settled in quickly, and in short time the laughs were flowing. In their own fields each of these guys is top notch, yet there was no evidence of egos or one-upmanship. We mercilessly ribbed one another, cracked jokes and slung one liners. Maybe it’s just that at heart we are all a bunch of kids who never grew up, and kids can make friends at the drop of a hat. Whatever the reason, it was quickly apparent there would be no problems getting along. I was personally in awe of the quick wit and talent of everyone in the group. I was honored to be included.

Dinner in Landstuhl- From far left clockwise around table: Jake Jacobs, Chip
Bok, Bruce Higdon, Rick Kirkman, Stephan Pastis, Jeff Keane, Mike Peters,
Jeff Bacon. I’m taking the picture.

Our liaison, driver and main guide was a gentleman named Jake Jacobs. He pulled up outside the USO center in a half sized blue transport bus and we piled in for another one and a half hours of travel to the small town of Landstuhl, in the south west corner of Germany near the border to France. Jake was good-natured and an excellent guide, speaking fluent German. He also took our ribbing in stride. He dropped us off at our lodging, The Hotel Christine, right in the heart of Landstuhl. We each took a well needed short rest and cleaned up before heading out for dinner. We had no plans for the evening outside of our own free time. Wednesday we would start our visit to the military medical facilities. We did, however, manage to find a local pub where we would spend our evenings (and Euros) unwinding.

Wednesday, October 1st

The Gang at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center

The next morning at 10:30 we headed out to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC). Operated by the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense, LRMC is the largest military hospital outside the continental U.S. I was told there are over 7,000 military personnel on staff and over 50,000 extended family members living on the base (including Ramstein Air Force Base next door) and in the area, which makes it the largest community of U.S. citizens not on U.S. soil. LRMC acts as the main center for treatment of wounded soldiers coming from Iraq and Afghanistan. The basic purpose of the center is to treat the injuries of the incoming soldiers to stabilize and prepare them to be sent back to the states for ongoing and more comprehensive treatment. In most cases soldiers only stay at LRMC for a few days. The quick turnaround of incoming and outgoing soldiers is staggering. (more…)