What today’s veterans can learn from tales of the Trojan War
SPIT FLIES FROM the wounded soldier’s mouth and his face pulses, red. “Death! Where are you?” roars Philoctetes, played by the actor Paul Giamatti. “Why, after all these years of calling, have you not appeared?” About 200 military mental-health experts watched him spiral into despair as they worked their way through box lunches, squeezed into a suburban-D.C. hotel conference room. “Earth, swallow this body whole, receive me just as I am, for I can’t stand it any longer,” he moans, breathless. “I am wretched, afflicted, and alone.”
Sophocles wrote these words 2,400 years ago when he inventoried the maladies of combat veterans in his plays Philoctetes and Ajax, which recount two Greek soldiers’ anguish during the Trojan War. Now the Theater of War project has revived these ancient stories, with a plain message for today’s veterans: your experiences are timeless. For as long as men have fought one another, they surely have been psychologically damaged by it. The diagnosis has changed over the years—shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress, and now post-traumatic stress disorder—but the consequences have remained constant: anger, isolation, guilt, grief, helplessness, and, at the most extreme, wrecked families and suicide.
Most of the many recent plays and films about Iraq and Afghanistan have failed commercially. But the Sophocles readings target a much narrower audience. Director Bryan Doerries has shown his production to five military audiences since August and hopes to expand its reach and perform regularly for returning troops. “I would like to see these plays used to destigmatize psychological injury,” he said....
Read entire article at Brian Mockenhaupt in the Atlantic
Sophocles wrote these words 2,400 years ago when he inventoried the maladies of combat veterans in his plays Philoctetes and Ajax, which recount two Greek soldiers’ anguish during the Trojan War. Now the Theater of War project has revived these ancient stories, with a plain message for today’s veterans: your experiences are timeless. For as long as men have fought one another, they surely have been psychologically damaged by it. The diagnosis has changed over the years—shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress, and now post-traumatic stress disorder—but the consequences have remained constant: anger, isolation, guilt, grief, helplessness, and, at the most extreme, wrecked families and suicide.
Most of the many recent plays and films about Iraq and Afghanistan have failed commercially. But the Sophocles readings target a much narrower audience. Director Bryan Doerries has shown his production to five military audiences since August and hopes to expand its reach and perform regularly for returning troops. “I would like to see these plays used to destigmatize psychological injury,” he said....