B.D.'s Helmet is Off

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury is one of the longest-running and most fascinating comic strips in existence. It's also one of my favorites, I'll be honest: I wouldn't subscribe to a newspaper that didn't carry it. His characters age and change, though slowly, and interact with reality. His political commentary is consistently liberal, but not radical. And he sometimes does things that aren't funny at all, but which are nonetheless powerful because of the care and continuity of the stories.

He has killed a few characters over the years, which in itself sets him apart from so much mainstream culture. Congresswoman Lacey (a gentle soul, a decent Republican, and an honest politician), and her bird-watching husband, for example, and a character who died of AIDS. These are not throwaway characters (like the Original Star Trek security officers whose presence on a mission seemed nearly always fatal) or story lines of random death just to explore grief, but events shaped by reality, well integrated into the characters' lives and the lives of other characters. Death is a real presence in the strip, just as it is in our lives: not a constant dramatic danger, but a fact of life.

Now he has done it again. The B.D. character has been with the strip since its beginnings, an honorable and patriotic man. B.D. always wears a helmet. In college it was a football helmet, and that's still what he wears when he's at home sometimes. In Vietnam, of course, he wore a combat helmet. In his civilian life, he worked as a member of the California Highway Patrol, with their distinctive headgear, and he's a National Guardsman, recently called up and serving in Iraq. But today the helmet came off. His hair is short, of course, a little grey around the sides, and a there's a little"hat head" muss to it.

Why? Why change an icon? Because B.D., like so many of our real troops, has been wounded: the helmet was removed by medics providing field aid and prepping him for medevac transport. In fact, B.D. joins thousands of US service personnel who have been permanently scarred by our failure to plan for peace: the final panel, which shows his hair for the first time, also shows his leg as a bandaged stump.

It's not funny: it's very sad. Sure, it's a little silly to be so affected, as I am, by this fiction. But that's what great fiction does: it makes things real. B.D. is a representative of many very real people. Many who don't personally know anyone in Iraq know this character. Many people who do know someone, or who are in Iraq, see B.D. as a surrogate, a representative. And his helmet has been a symbol of his constant service, which is offered by so many real people and which was honored by its presence in this long story. And it's sad to see that lost.

I don't think B.D. is going to die: he seems to be in good hands (though we will probably see some very pointed commentary on the state of military and veterans' hospitals in the near future). But he'll never be the same. Neither will we, loyal readers or loyal Americans, ever be the same.

Update: Ralph Luker found this:

"The Journal-Advocate," of Sterling, Colorado,"has chosen not to publish this week's Doonesbury in the paper because of the graphic, violent battlefield depictions of Iraq in this week's installment. The Doonesbury comic strip for this week is available to our subscribers at the front counter, or by fax, mail or e-mail, if requested. We will resume printing Doonesbury in the paper when the content is deemed suitable for publication in the Journal-Advocate."

Update #2: NPR also had a commentary on B.D.'s injury, which says pretty much the same things I did. I'm pretty typical in my reaction, apparently.