‘These People Are Here’

Didn't that give you pause?
No. The one thing you learn from Vietnam is to back the troops. What are they supposed to all say, they're not going? Mainly I was saying in my criticism, 'Can we just ask a couple of questions that no one seems to be asking?' I mean, they didn't choose to come here. They were ordered to come here. So it didn't faze me in the least. In fact it made it more compelling. You know, they get here and they don't have the proper gear, the proper this and the proper that. At least give them the proper entertainment.

Is there certain comedy you can't do in a war zone?
You don't talk about the commander in chief. It's their commander in chief. When I was here last year I realized you don't talk about Bush or now Obama, unless it's really kind of innocuous. But you can talk about Democrats and Republicans. That's the way I skirt it. It's not their military leadership.

Tell me something that's surprised you.
How bright guys like General [Carter] Ham [the commander of U.S. Army, Europe] and Admiral [Michael] Mullen [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs] are. The list of names goes on. They're all really gifted and they really are honest in many ways. They weren't feeding me a line. And you really don't want to feed me a line. I said on stage a couple of times that maybe a military coup really isn't so bad. At least these guys seem to know how to take care of things. I find them to be more in touch with the people they are in charge of than congressmen are in terms of the people they were representing, and that impressed me. It's not something I would have expected.

It's not something you would have expected because you'd really been insulated from the military?
That's right. We all have that insulation and it has really grown since the Vietnam War. I mean it's a whole other society out here. We have little contact with it and the less people embedded and involved from the civilian population, the less healthy it is. That's one of the things they talked about with me. The fact that I'm doing the tour and I get press reminds people that these people are here. They keep talking about two wars and you wouldn't know it being back there.

This is your second time in Afghanistan. Is there something funny about Afghanistan? Nothing. I just don't know how people live here. I really don't know. You fight a war here but how people live in this environment, we don't see much of it but what we do see, I mean Jesus. Kathleen Madigan had the funny line. She said, if we'd have done this in Detroit, we'd be seen as liberators.

© 2008