Garry Trudeau, the creator and writer of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” has a fine article in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about the kinds of preparations he undertook (and still undertakes) to write about war:

Both soldiers, with the help of incredibly dedicated counselors, are trying to figure out how to live with their emotional wounds as they make the transition out of a military culture that still stigmatizes post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then into a civilian population that can’t possibly understand what they’ve been through.

The reason that I’ve been listening to their stories is that my character B.D. is now at that precise point in his own life, and I need to learn about what that must feel like before I can write about it.

When and if I finally do, I have to do another terrible thing: I have to make it funny. And I have to find a way of doing so without contributing to the suffering that these young veterans are enduring.