Article about Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) and his relationship with the military

Garry Trudeau is still learning

"Soon after finishing dinner on December 1, 1969, Garry Trudeau ’70, ’73MFA—along with a group of fellow Davenport College students—huddled together in the college’s common room, anxiously waiting for America’s first draft lottery since World War II. The drawing would determine which young men would be sent to fight in Vietnam.

“I remember the evening with some clarity,” Trudeau says, “having been thunderstruck by my early number, twenty-seven.” The Yale senior had good reason to be alarmed, as more than half of eligible men would receive a draft notice in 1970."

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"In the early years of his long-running strip, Trudeau repeatedly railed against the Vietnam War. “I got some hate mail for these anti-war strips,” he says. The cartoonist also skewered those who supported the unpopular war, including his central character, B. D., who was loosely based on Brian Dowling ’69, the legendary Yale quarterback. In a famous cartoon published in January of 1972, B. D. enlists in the army to avoid writing a term paper. This absurdist jab captured the cynicism of the era.

But in recent decades, Trudeau’s relationship with the American military establishment has taken a one-eighty. As retired General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George W. Bush ’68, tells me, “I’m a huge fan of Garry’s many strips on America’s armed forces. They have done an enormously valuable public service.”

https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/6207-garry-trudeau-is-still-learning