This was printed up as a USO Autograph Card for giving out on tour

Visting FOBs

NCS Osama Watch- No sighting. Pastis claiming 65% of any reward if we spot him

Originally each group was supposed to visit up to 6 forward operating bases (FOBs) over the three days we were spending in the Kandahar area, but due to the flight snafus we were only scheduled to visit two each. Considering how long it took us to actually GET to Afghanistan it was really too bad our time there was so short that we could’t visit more sites, but co-ordinating and promoting our visits were not easy to do, so we just made the best of the time we did get with the soldiers.

Jeff Keane and Stephan Pastis look thrilled to be back in a Black Hawk

Like our visit to Iraq last year, we flew helicopters from KAF to the various camps and FOBs. Some of our flights were in Blackhawks like in Iraq, but a number of them were in the much larger CH-47 Chinooks. These are twin rotor troop and cargo transport helicopters, and hold about 60 or so soldiers as well as room for palettes of supplies. One of the coolest moments of the trip was when we were on our way back from our first FOB visit in a Chinook, with the back door open and a rear gunner on it. We were being escorted by two Huey helicopters that criss-crossed about our larger helo… if I would have had “Ride of the Valkyries” cranking in my ear it would have been like something out of “Apocalypse Now”.

This is what Afghanistan looks like…

The helicopter flights over the Afghanistan landscape really showed how truly desolate this country is. With the exception of a few craggy hills, most of what I saw of Iraq was flat and sandy, with a fair amour of scrubby brush and vegetation. Afghanistan, at least the areas were flew over, are so lifeless it looks like it could be the moon. Looming, knife-edge mountains seem to violently burst from the endless dust with little or no foothills as warning. The earth seems to go on forever with almost no sign of a tree or plant growth whatsoever. Small villages made of mud huts scar the landscape here and there, and are the only sign of any life amid the sprawling arid miles. You can’t even really call what coats the earth here “sand”… it’s better described as a dust so fine it makes talcum powder seem like coffee grounds, and lies a foot deep in places. We got lucky with the weather, which was calm during our stay. I was told the ever-present haze can turn into a complete brown-out in the blink of an eye when a wind storm whips across the horizon.

A small Afghan village… (more…)

Now that we have left the area we are allowed to say our cartoonist’s USO tour spent three days in Afghanistan, specifically Kandahar and FOBs in the southern part of the country.

The picture was taken at the Kandahar Air Field prior to one of our trips to outlying camps to draw for the deployed troops. I thought maybe the soldiers might get a look at me in the gear and think I was Special Forces, but it turns out they thought I was Special Ed.

A full description of the trip is coming next week.

Another group of cartoonists are off soon (at an indisposed date and time… I’d tell you specifics but they are above your pay grade) to the middle east to draw for U.S. soldiers deployed “down range” i.e. in the war zone. This group includes Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues) Mike Luckovich (Pulitzer prize winning editorial cartoonist), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) and myself.. clearly they have me along to make the coffee.

We’ll have a stop in Landstuhl, Germany to draw at the Regional Medical Center and the Ramstein AFB there before heading on to a new area of the war zone that the USO cartoonists tours have not yet seen. It should be an interesting adventure. I will blog all about it after we return… I’d tell you more but then I’d have to kill you…

Busy, busy, busy already in the new year. Above is a small spot illustration I did for On Patrol magazine of USO president and CEO Sloan Gibson. On Patrol is the magazine of the USO, and the Winter issue features coverage of the USO sponsored NCS cartoonist’s trip to Germany, Kuwait and Iraq back in October. The website linked above is not yet updated to include the winter issue’s content, but the magazine features a great cover by Michael Ramirez, some pictures of us in action (I mean drawing… not the kind of action the people we drew are used to) and an article that is mostly made up of a “journal” of the trip written by me. Most of my contributions to the article are by way of revised versions of my blog posts on the trip: See Prelude, Washington DC/Germany, Kuwait, Iraq.

I might as well take the opportunity to once again thank the USO for sponsoring our trip to the Middle-East. In a year that featured a ridiculous amount of traveling and speaking for me, including trips to England, Colombia, and Australia, the USO trip was really something special.

Arriving at the airport in Kuwait City, I was prepared for some major culture shock. Traveling in Europe is one thing… usually you can figure out the meaning of things like signs based on the common nature of the Latin based languages, and they all use the same basic alphabetical charters which at least look familiar. Arabic, on the other hand, is totally indecipherable to one with no knowledge of the language. Every time I saw something written in Arabic I had the impulse to turn it upside down.

The Kuwait Airport

My fears were groundless. Almost every sign is Kuwait, especially road and direction signs, had English translations below. There was no shortage of western influences, either. The airport food court had a Burger King, McDonalds, and money other familiar fast food restaurants… and of course a Starbucks. (more…)

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.
(more…)

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.

Here’s a link to an article by “Comic Riffs” writer Michael Cavna about our USO trip.

Back row: Me, Jeff Bacon, Bruce Higdon, Rick Kirkman, Jeff Keane, Garry Trudeau
Front: Mike Peters, Stephan Pastis, Chip Bok, Mike Ramirez (Photo courtesy Jeff Bacon)

Here’s a picture of all us us “geared up” before flying back to Kuwait from Iraq on a packed C-130 military airplane. Here is a link to a short story about one of the group’s visits at FOB Marez that includes a picture of me drawing one of the crowd. Right after this picture was taken we traveled for 18 hours straight to reach Washington DC. Until I got back to the USA the last shower I’d taken was in Saddam Hussein’s palace… something the folks on our flight likely did not appreciate. Since all ten of us were equally dusty and smelly, maybe they didn’t notice me all that much.

We just landed in Washington DC from our trip overseas to meet with and draw for U.S. troops in Germany and the Middle East. Now that we have safely left the area, we can reveal where we were.

After leaving Germany we traveled to Kuwait City, Kuwait and drew in several FOB camps including Camp Buerhing and Camp Virginia, traveling by road vehicle. On Monday we flew out to Iraq on a military plane and spent the next two days visiting FOB camps like Speicher, Q-West, Marez, Victory, Liberty and Slayer near some well know places like Tikrit, Kirkuk, Mosul and Baghdad.

The above video was posted by Spc. Angela Widener and shows our visit to Camp Marez in Iraq. If you have trouble playing the video (If you see the word “EMBED” and some code instead of a picture) do the following: click the center “Play” button, then click the arrow next to the word “EMBED” on the top, then click the play button again.

Much more later.