Garry Trudeau is best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist whose long-running “Doonesbury” strip is carried in hundreds of newspapers — including The Courier-Journal. Trudeau also has Doonesbury.com, an interactive Web site for fans.
The latest addition to his Web site is The Sandbox, a blog by real, active-duty soldiers who write from their posts or bases around the world.
The Sandbox was announced in the Oct. 8 “Doonesbury” panel, when cartoon character Ray Hightower, a soldier, noted the growing dangers of reporting on the war and how the public “feels increasingly disconnected from troops in the field.” His announced solution: The Sandbox.
Trudeau, as channeled through Hightower in the introductory panel: “At The Sandbox, contributors can operate in a clean, lightly edited debriefing environment where all content, no matter how robust, is secured by the First Amendment. So if you support the troops — but haven’t a clue what they’re actually up to — you owe it to yourself to log onto The Sandbox.”
I second Ray Hightower. What you’ll find in The Sandbox — http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/ — is not remotely cartoonish. It is thrillingly and chillingly alive and haunting, words, sentences and stories shared by those who fight and serve, people in harm’s way whom most of us don’t know — but may come to know through this blog.
I was so taken with The Sandbox, and so curious about this new arm of “Doonesbury,” that I contacted Trudeau. He was kind enough to answer the following questions in an e-mail interview for Courier-Journal readers.
So, some important background before you find your way to The Sandbox, and getting to know some of our real troops a little better, thanks to a cartoon strip:
Q: When did you get the idea for The Sandbox, and why did you decide to do it?
A: Over the past couple years, we’ve received some rather compelling posts from servicemembers on the Blowback page of Doonesbury.com. About six weeks ago, it occurred to me that maybe we should have one place on the site dedicated to the posts of active-duty troops.
I’d been reading milblogs sporadically, but had been frustrated by the poor wheat-to-chaff ratio that plagues most blogs. The uneven quality — understandable given the constant pressure to update — doesn’t make for a very efficient use of reader time.
So we decided to be a compiling site, bringing together the best of what we could find. For the first offerings, we contacted a number of milbloggers and cherry-picked from existing content, but now most of what we’re posting is original.
Q: In your visits with troops, was there one soldier or one anecdote that stuck with you, a spirit or story that spurred the endeavor?
A: I don’t know as you can draw a straight line from my conversations with wounded soldiers to The Sandbox, but the story I still find the most compelling was one I heard at Walter Reed. A female MP, in her mid-20s, was tasked to defend the roof of an Iraqi police station by herself.
While she’s setting up behind sandbags, two RPG’s tear into her position, slicing through her forearm and burying her in sand. The others in her squad rush to the roof, pull her out, and take her down to a HMMWV, where she’s stabilized by a medic.
Meanwhile, against orders, two of her buddies return to the roof, search through the sand, retrieve her dismembered hand, and remove her engagement ring, which they bring back downstairs and place in her remaining good hand. “I could have gotten another ring, it was just a thing,” she told me, “but it meant so much to me that they would do that for me.”
It was a tale of gratitude, not loss. It was the first story I heard, and it took my breath away.
Q: What did you expect, when you launched The Sandbox? Have the results so far been what you expected or has it taken off in surprising and unexpected directions?
A: We had no idea what to expect, but the enthusiasm of the milbloggers we’d contacted in advance gave us reason to believe it might work. Initially we were mostly worried about whether we’d get enough contributions to sustain the quality, but those concerns proved unfounded.
Very strong material started coming in right away, and if there’s any surprise, it’s that posters and readers have found each other so quickly. One blogger told us he’d gotten more comments in one day than he had in the whole time he’d been blogging (because we list the milblog urls, many comments go directly to them). Most milbloggers really don’t reach very far beyond family and friends, so this is an audience of a different magnitude for them.
Q: How do you decide what to post? Do you look for something “representative” or something of its own voice and viewpoint? How do you verify authenticity?
A: We can really only handle three or four pieces a day. Obviously we’re looking for variety — in authorship, tone and subject matter — but we’re open to anything people want to submit. Other than requesting a military address, we’re not in a position to verify authenticity. But there’s little braggadocio in these dispatches — they’re mostly thoughtful, heartfelt reflections.
It’s counterintuitive to think that these pieces would be made up. Besides, The Sandbox isn’t really about reporting. It’s a blog, and people generally understand the difference.
Q: Is this a blog for the troops, or is this a blog for the American people, or both?
A: We have readers in-theater, but it’s obviously not really for their edification. It’s mostly for people on the homefront who want a direct line to what some of the troops in the field are thinking and feeling.
Q: Can this be a bellwether for gauging troop morale? Is it wrong to look at it that way?
A: Yes. It’s much too anecdotal and random. The writers represent only a handful of the 140,000 troops serving.
Q: How will The Sandbox inform your work with “Doonesbury,” or will it? Why or why not?
A: Too soon to tell. I originally went to other milblogs for inspiration, and there’s no reason to think I won’t also find it on our site.
Q: One thing I’ve noticed in reading many of the posts is how the mission is almost secondary to the fraternity that exists among soldiers.
A: Well, it’s a truism that gets rediscovered with every war. No matter how urgent or grand the cause, out on the field, they’re fighting for each other.
Q: It seems patronizing to say this, and I don’t mean it that way at all, but I have been really struck by the wonderful writing, even the literary style, of the posts on The Sandbox. What does this reveal about the troops fighting this war? What does it reveal that some of us might be surprised by that?
A: Well, good writing emerges from all sorts of unexpected places, but remember, milbloggers are self-selecting. They obviously enjoy writing, and the response to their work matters to them, so they take some care. I should also add that the site is very well edited by David Stanford, a former senior editor at Viking-Penguin, who has impeccable taste and an invisible hand. It’s a little premature to say, but if we can sustain the quality, The Sandbox might evolve into a kind of Centcom literary magazine.
Q: The Vice President’s assessment to the contrary, things appear to be very bloody and very bad in Iraq now. Is there anything good to come out of this war, based on what you have heard and seen personally with the troops and with what the troops are sharing in The Sandbox?
A: The only possible good from a war is an outcome that improves people’s lives. Everything else is awful.
# Closer to home . . . As of Oct. 18, 67 U.S. troops had been killed in action in Iraq in October alone. One of them was Army Spc. Timothy A. Fulkerson.
Spc. Fulkerson, a 20-year-old native of Utica, Ky., died Oct. 8 from wounds he received during combat operations near Tikrit; The Courier-Journal carried a story about his death.
Last week, the U.S. Army e-mailed a statement from the family, in which his mother described her son as a “pure soul” who was “book smart and more responsible than people twice his age.”
I have posted the family’s full statement and Spc. Fulkerson’s photograph with this column on the Web. Please read about this young man.
