Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 14, 2012

really really great

Toggle is awesome – and Alex is working on being pretty great herself. I think she’ll be just fine – and they make a great couple.

Not just “Good Friends” but friends with “Good Judgement.”

The rarest kind!

Alex gets big points for communicating her neurosis. Everyone’s got hangups, but talking about them goes a long way toward both people being able to live with them.

I love these wedding strips and all of the characters interacting for the first time in a long time!

Toggle makes Alex a better person.

Geez, after following this strip for decades, as it goes from generation to generation.. when this couple has kids I’m gonna feel really old!

I think that of all of GT’s characters, I like Toggle the best. I’d be proud to have a kid like him.Unfortunately, I didn’t play in a rock band, although Mom looks vaguely familiar.

Toggle hs been a brilliant character. I can’t believe GT went this far in his imaginings when Toggle first came onto the scene.

Hillbilly music is likely Blue Grass. But I think in this context he was referring to all types of ‘country’ music. What another poster referred to as ‘sheep kicking’ music.But, you are right. He should try harder to avoid driving near cliffs.

Good thing Ray isn’t doing the toast at Sgt. Frank Wuterich’s wedding!

Hillbilly music is what they country music used to be called from the 1920s to the 1940s.

The generation transfer, not gap carries on. The wedding is not the place to bring up what they only talk about among the “been there, done that” group. My son called last night, we can relate. Interesting as he goes back to school after military that he’s experienced more, been more places, and learned things that the “older generation” who stayed here at home, will never understand.

When vets get to talking and there are non-vets around, we keep it light and funny. When we’re alone it can get darker. But you don’t want to hear about Willy Peter and you really don’t want to hear about Bouncing Betty.

Toggle was driving Ray and others in Afghanistic when they got hit by an Improvised Explosive Device, IED. The strip has seen Toggle through the immediate aftermath of the crash, through hospitalization, through rehab, through meeting Alex online, up until today. That’s where he got the eyepatch and the Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI, which mercifully seems to affects only his speech—not his essential sweetness or common sense.

Gweedo, that’s a very good comment.

Been reading this strip with one eye since its begaining now suddenly not so long ago I have fallen into its enchantment. And now I wait eagerly each day for the comings and goings of Doonesbury and for me, elightenment.

I am already old!!But then …… old is relative and I’ve got some of them

If Vietnam Vets here . . . I always kinda thought the movie “Platoon” was ground breaking because (I imagined) it was the first to capture ‘the feel’ of being in combat there (like “Private Ryan” did for WW2).But of course, I don’t have a clue, since I was 11 years old when it ended . . .