Elizabeth’s purchase of a rickety Suziki Vitura happened to coincide with a grenade attack on the Ruhengeri bus terminal which missed us by exactly an hour, so we’ve been driving the windy road to the Child Rehabilitation Center, Elizabeth getting better and better at the drive that we keep joking we’re going to base the most boring video game in history on: “Musanze 500,” which will consist of spending 90% of your time crawling up winding roads at 5 mph behind toxic smoke-exhaling cargo jeeps, with the rest of the time spent passing said jeeps in death-defying and idiotic maneuvers around blind corners out of sheer frustration.


Pacy gets shotgun because his legs are longest, and Ari and I take turns sitting in the "shitty chair," which is the rear-left seat with a backrest that is rusted into a permanently acute angle. Our 4-man team folds up quite nicely into what we’ve named the “De-mobile.” After a couple of weeks together, we’re hitting our stride – the car journeys feel shorter and the theatre sessions feel simultaneously more effortless and more productive.



Yesterday, without exactly planning to, we ended up staging absurd and hilarious scenes based on the boys’ worst nightmares about returning to their families (10 of them are set to visit their families for the first time this week).

Clowning with deep fears, I’ve decided, is my new favorite game. If I could send you a film of anything that we’ve done so far, it would be of Aimable playing Jean Damascène’s father—holding his nose, gagging, checking his shoes, and searching frantically through the house to figure out what smelled so damned bad, before realizing that it was his dirty little jungle-rotted long-lost son and promptly chucking him physically out the door. The laughter, my god, how we laughed. I imagine playing this way in prisons, streets, hospitals, refugees camps…anywhere that there is pain and fear, there is joyous, empowering, tension-relieving laughter to be tickled out.

Also, it just makes good theatre. I think of the 2 entire sessions that we spent trying to tease out comedy around “daily life in the forest.” It was off-theme and we all felt it. There was some general buffoonery around food-stealing and farting and even (I didn’t get the translation but I’m pretty sure) poo-throwing, but none of it was really that funny because—I’m realizing—none of it was tied to something urgent and real for the boys now. At the end of the session on Friday, pensive natural-leader Crispin asked when we would get around to the theme of families rejecting their sons. I nodded agreement and promised to start with that Monday. Monday it was raining cats and dogs and we braced ourselves for a depressing session about rejection under the half-soaked overhang on the stairs outside the dorms (there are no rooms to retreat to in this weather, as the classrooms are still being built and the rest of the indoor spaces are stuffed full of bunk beds or food stores). The session ended up being anything but a downer. Aimable’s hilarious son-sniffing performance was rounded off with an “adoption auction” (one of Elizabeth’s genius ideas) where the boys sold one another to the giggling crowd by announcing their “product’s” innumerable skills, while the boy in question mimed along to prove his worth: “This child is very strong! He is very sociable! He knows how to cook! He is 14 years old! He can lift that chair over his head!” As the “selling points” got more and more absurd, the boys got more and more excited to “welcome” one another into their “homes.” At the end of the session I stood on the bench and announced, “The audience at Ishyo is going to fall in love with you.”

On the bus to Reuhengeri, Elizabeth, Pacy and I are brainstorming ways to generate stageworthy movement and text. “Self-selecting” didn’t happen at all—all of the boys participated enthusiastically and are thrilled about the show—meaning our cast size is nearly 40, and we’re going to have to get really creative on leading the group to produce material that they can all perform together.

Elizabeth recounts a memory-based exercise that her director Rhodessa used in her work in prisons in San Francisco. The group says in unison, “I remember my mother.” Then they walk around the space until, on a collective impulse, they stop moving. At this point anyone who would like to speak solo begins by saying “I remember…” and then says something about their mother. This text is written down and can be collaged later for performance.

We all decide that the memory game is good model, but that we should choose something a bit less fraught than “mother.” A few of these kids lost their mothers (along with the rest of their families) during massacres or fighting in their Kivu camps, and those whose mothers are still living have obviously been separated from them for a while, often forcibly.

We agree to change the wording to “I remember, in the forest…” figuring that gives a lot of leeway to talk about anything from their recently abandoned daily lives. We begin by creating a group ritual to begin and end each session from here on out (the boys choose the words “Gukina, Kwishyima, Kubabara, Isomo,” meaning, “Play, Joy, Sadness, Lesson” creating movements to accompany the chant), and then we play a image-based freeze game where the boys dance to music and then freeze when it stops, creating the picture of a word or phrase that Pacy calls out just before stopping the music. The boys had chosen the words beforehand, and despite our not having said anything about relating it to war, the words that spilled forth were all on-theme: “regret”; “to be bound at the wrist”; “being shot at”; “to evacuate someone injured”; “to transport gear”; “to force to one’s knees”. The youth are amazing performers, physically engaged in a way that I have never seen in a group their age. The dancing is joyful, filled with their spirit; its juxtaposition with their frozen pictures is powerful.


After a break (which means more dancing), we jump into the text exercise. As Pacy nods, scribbles, and translates, I begin to worry about our choice of the word “Forest.”

I remember how they beat me during the military training. I remember trying to escape from the training camp. Being caught and taken back. I remember sleeping three nights in the forest before they caught me.

I remember well the time I was separated from my parents. That’s when I began living a difficult life. They made me transport gear that was too heavy for me, and en route we inflicted a lot of violence on civilian farmers, and forced them to give us their things.

I remember being forced to consume ganja. I would pass whole days smoking non-stop, and then all night I would participate in ambushes.

I remember being shot at for entire days.

I remember my close friend who died.

All of the worst things, I realize a bit too late, happened in the forest. This is session 2 of 10, and the boys are pushing into dark territory faster than we had expected or intended. At the end of the session ever-inquisitive Janvier asks, “What about the comedy?” Yes, next session we’ll definitely look at comedy.

Thursday I hop on a bus to check out the RDRC Demobilization Centers in the Northwest. It's been a long week of official meetings and NGO jargon, so I'm grateful to have Elizabeth, a young writer on my wavelength, to chit-chat with on the 2-hour journey to Ruhengeri.


Our first stop is at the country’s main center in Mutobo. The facility is simultaneously modest and impressive. Rickety warehouse-like structures—built entirely from logs and sheets of tin—form classrooms, kitchens, and dormitories for the 500 ex-fighters who have spent the last 3 months here taking classes on everything from microeconomics to HIV awareness. Our conversation with the director, Frank, is formal but friendly. He describes the curriculum and the process of repatriation. We agree that my ice-breaking theatre skills will be most effective at the beginning of the next “class cycle” after the current group graduates, and the new group begin their program. I’ll send him an email with a draft proposal of a 4-hour “trust and groupwork” theatre module. While I’m grateful to be included in what is clearly a tightly regimented program, I find myself wondering if I’m going to spend the next two months delivering a piecemeal string of scratch-the-surface one-off workshops.

By the time we arrive at the CRC—the demobilization home for child ex-combatants—it is already 4pm and we’re going to have to rush to catch our 6pm return bus. Rafael, the unassuming center director, meets us as we scoot up to the corner store decorated with a painting of a massive Skol beer bottle (the clearest identifying landmark he could direct us to). He walks us down the dirt path to the center, and as we approach we are welcomed by the sound of traditional Burundian drums—not unlike the familiar sound of the Japanese Taiko. We walk past the buildings where the drumming is coming from, and sit in Rafael’s office where I do the requisite “I-am-blah-de-blah” thing, and he nods, smiles, and wrings his hands. Rafael doesn’t say much, mostly “yes.” He’s very open to the idea of doing some sort of project; many of the kids here don’t go to school, most cannot read or write and almost any activity is welcome. “The only problem is one of language…” he says, looking worried. I assure him that I’d be bringing a translator, and he has no further concerns.

We ask to tour the center and as we pass the building with the drums I peek in to see young boys—some of them only 12 or 13 years old—banging away happily on traditional Rwandan cow-skins with improvised drumsticks (chair legs, branches, dowels). The young leader, beads of sweat dripping down his smiling chin, beats out a complicated rhythm on a small high-pitched drum and the 6 or 7 others bang out a much simpler rhythm in response. I clap and dance along to the beat and the boy nearest me thrusts some sticks into my hands. Thanks to Mom and two decades of Taiko, playing along is easy and fun. Fun fun fun. The most fun I’ve had all day. I want to stay here in Ruhengeri with these boys. I want to move in. I want to make a play.

Finally, I get excited, ambitious. Can we bus into Kigali? Can we perform at Ishyo Art Center? Can there be drums in the piece? How much would it cost to transport the drums? How can we publicize and get the community to come? Is two months enough? Should I change my flight and extend my stay?

Finally, and for the first time since my arrival, being here is more important than being anywhere else.

I remember having a conversation with my friend Walshie, an urban planner in London, about the negative social impact of bad urban design. Architecture, she explained, creates opportunities. And badly planned architecture creates the opportunity for bad things to happen. As an obvious example she cited how the installation of a women’s public underground toilet in one poorly policed low-income area lead to a shocking number of muggings and rapes on site. Other examples of poor planning included closed stairwells, fragmentation of public spaces, and long passageways without overlooking windows.

This was my first real exposure to the idea that “peace” was as much a question of well-planned infrastructure—built with an awareness and integration of the lowest common denominator—as it was about idealistic education and goodwill. Feel-good cross-border initiatives and humanistic moral education programs have value, sure, but equally if not more important is the construction of a sturdy social infrastructure that takes people where they are at, and is creatively designed to maximize the potential of a survival-driven human population in the context of an unequal and unjust world.

At a macro level, “peacebuilding” is incredibly technical. Take the RDRC (Rwanda Demobilization and Reintegration Commission) as an example. With an annual turnover of $52 million and a head office in Kigali with a couple dozen staff, it’s easy to wonder what exactly they do. In order to spare you a long and incomprehensible list, let’s create a fictional character, we’ll call him “Bosco,” and map his journey from the Congo to his native Rwanda. Bosco’s Hutu family fled Rwanda with Bosco when he was a child in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.


He spent the next two years in a refugee community in Kivu, until one day when RPF fighters attacked his camp. Bosco fled to a nearby community where he was picked up by FDLR fighters offering him protection and the opportunity to avenge his presumed-dead family. For many years, Bosco fought. Around 1999, he heard rumors that Rwanda was peaceably repatriating ex-FDLR and even ex-FAR (the army in charge at the time of the Genocide), but he had nothing to return to, as his commanders insisted to him that his own family was dead. Between 2001 and 2006, several of Bosco’s friends deserted the army, some taking their dependent families with them. Soon, through word-of-mouth and sensitization programs, it became common knowledge that MONUC (the UN Mission in DRC) advertised safe transfer to Rwanda via their demobilization centers in Kivu. Civilians wanting safety and better opportunities were even posing as ex-combatants and flocking to the centers. By then, however, defecting was a near-impossible feat, and those caught trying were immediately executed; for ironically as the more moderate commanders fled the Congo, the army was left in the hands of increasingly extremist leadership.


Bosco spent an entire year planning his escape, and when fighting broke out, his unit was mobilized, providing him with the opportunity to flee. From the MUNOC transit center he was transported to a screening center on the Rwandan border, where he was asked his several questions about his military history to verify where he served. He was also asked his age, and this determined that he would be sent to the adult Demobilization Center in Mutobo. Among the other people screened, civilians were send back, dependents of combatants were sent into their Rwandan communities of origin, and child soldiers were sent to the Child Rehabilitation Center in Ruhengeri. Bosco was terrified throughout the screening process, as the entire demobilization program was run by the Rwandan government, meaning the staff were all “enemy” RDF. There was a very real possibility the rumor that the demobilization program was a ploy to capture and imprison or execute FDLR soldiers was actually true. After his transfer to Mutobo, Bosco was given some pocket money and told to visit his home community in Rwanda and then to report back to the center in 2 weeks. Staff at the center helped to trace the location of any family members, and it was in this way that Bosco learned that his Mother and 2 of his Sisters were still alive, and had repatriated in 2001. Bosco was promised $100 USD if he reported back to the center and completed the 3-month training program which covers everything from tourism and entrepreneurship to health and HIV awareness. He graduated the training program along with 500 other classmates (2 women and 498 men), after which he returned to his hometown to live with his mother, where his was enrolled in a year-long vocational training program for welding, paid for by the RDRC. Upon completing the program, the RDRC bought him $300 worth of welding materials so that he could start his own business. Thereafter, he was checked up on quarterly in a home visit by an RDRC staff member.

In a nutshell, providing safe transit to Rwanda is actually a microscopic portion of the work of demobilization. The RDRC has learned from the recent tragic examples of “demobilized” populations in West Africa who were unskilled and unable to properly reintegrate, leaving them highly likely to join a militia—any militia—any time fighting broke out in the region. The RDRC has to design and budget for demobilizing a human being from A to Z: from outreach and propaganda in the Congo to combat false rumors about the program, to coursework, to strategic bribery to keep participants engaged in the reintegration process until completion. The success rates here are among the highest in the region. And the annual budget, interestingly, is one of the lowest.

It’s exciting that institutions like the RDRC are working this way at a grassroots level; taking a single human being exactly where he or she is at, and investing in giving that person the capacity and resources to contribute to society in a healthy way. I wonder when we will stop holding useless protests and start treating corporations, governments, and other human institutions with exactly this same level of intelligence, generosity, and compassion. Telling the military-industrial complex to stop building weapons is analogous to telling a soldier to stop fighting. It’s probably useless unless you invest your own resources in investigating and presenting a healthier—and more profitable—alternative activity to pursue.

Africa does something to your body. Stepping off of the plane I immediately feel it: a top-to-toe release that is unlike anything you’d experience in London, barring perhaps the climactic final minutes of a top-notch Alexander Technique class.

Public transportation in Rwanda is not for pansies. After a quick nap to recover from my red-eye, I hail a moto-taxi into town to attend a screening of a friend’s movie. I fiddle with the strap on the purely aesthetic helmet while my host Emmanuel negotiates a non-Muzungu price with the driver. This helmet will spend the next fifteen minutes bobbing atop my head as haplessly as I bob atop the back of the speeding motorbike. But the headgear does have a soothing effect in that it places distance between me and the 60-mph Kigali air and the stark, open mountainside dotted with clusters of shacks in the dusty red distance. My feet are massaged into submission by the rumbling bike engine and the rest of my muscles follow suit, embracing this moment of pure mortality. I find it funny to consider how little stress and danger have to do with one another. Tech week on a recent puppet show had me tied up in knots. This death-defying motorcycle ride is what’s helping me unwind.

The movie, “Grey Matter” ends us being about (big surprise) trauma, and the central protagonist—a young Rwandan man who lost his family in the genocide—spends the majority of the movie wearing (bigger surprise) a bright red motorcycle helmet. He does everything in this helmet—showers, paints, hides in the attic. It’s an incredible image; I’m sure I would have appreciated it on its own merit, even without the serendipitous timing. But my ride into town has given me a special appreciation for the director’s choice to show a response to trauma that is so physical. Trauma, vulnerability, repression…these are physical words as much as they are emotional. Trauma is stored in the body. In fact, if this year has taught me anything, it’s that the fictitious boundaries between mind and body become impossible to maintain at the extreme edges of human experience. When our defenses are penetrated, we are wounded entirely: mind, body, soul.

Healing, then, has to similarly encompass the whole and integrated self. Somehow, this seems to happen more naturally in Rwanda than in any other place that I have been. It might be an audacious and unfounded thing to say, but something tells me that healing, as a process, happens faster here.

But maybe that’s just my sun-baked body talking.

I’ve been negligent with this blog these past weeks; it’s not from a lack of thoughts and experiences…actually, it’s the opposite.

Chen Alon of Combatants for Peace recently said this to me in a conversation about political theatre vs. personal narrative theatre: "Aesthetics are Ethics." It's taken a few weeks for the truth of this statement to really sink in.

The first interviews we collected here were with disabled veterans of an older generation; most of their stories came from wars fought in 1967 or 1973, and emphasized their journey of overcoming physical and emotional trauma after combat. Text collected about the 2006 Lebanese war had a similar focus, so the script began to take a fairly clear narrative shape. Then I began talking to another crop of ex-fighters, those who had served in the Occupied Territories and had later joined Combatants for Peace and Breaking the Silence--organizations with a clear political ethos regarding the very specific (and hugely polemic) issue of the occupation and Israel-Palestine. I realized, hearing these new stories, that I didn't have enough material at that point to create a piece exploring this new theme in a coherent or useful way. Throwing something as sensitive as a personal trauma narrative up against the full judgement of deeply-held political opinions without the time nor the in-depth dialogue to find a common ground in the perspectives...it felt like the wrong thing to do at the time. It felt like a different piece. And personally, I struggled with my omissions, with what to include and what not to. Not least of all because of my time in Beirut, of my conversations with friends who had spent a great deal of time in the West Bank, because I knew the urgency of these narratives, and what "IDF" symbolizes to so many. I knew that many people would find it difficult to understand that I had compiled a full-length script about the experiences of IDF soldiers, and not mentioned Palestine or the occupation even once. But at the end of the day, it wasn't the story I was here to tell. Not this time around. To tell it, to even attempt to, would take more time, more care, more nuance. And this time I was here to listen to the guys at Beit Halochem, and to understand and present their stories.

Here's a clip of the actors seeing the vets (whose stories they had rehearsed and embodied) for the first time as they walk and wheel their way into the hall for the reading at Beit Halochem. Orna, who knows the vets from the interviews, runs introductions for the cast: "That's Uzi there, talking to Raffi; and Itsik has just come in behind them..."

The feedback after the reading is predictably mixed. An old vet wonders why we didn't turn the microphones up louder, and another one asks us to include more stories of "fallen heroes". A left-wing activist condemns the piece as "nihilistic," because it doesn't show a way out of the culture of militarism; she wants us to show "what's happening now, in Hebron." Roni, our security guard friend from the very first day is moved to tears. A man whose name I never caught spends ten minutes telling us that we have shown him an understanding of trauma that "no one, not even my wife, can have," and thanks us profusely, parting with "God bless you."

Some of the other feedback is less emotive. Raffi, in his matter-of-fact manner tells us that the way we presented his story of his Judo team’s visit to a Swedish bar was very effective, and that he thought the narrating actor should actually show the bit where Raffi takes out his prosthetic eyes. “We did! We did take it out!” the cast replies, giggling. Of course Raffi didn’t actually get to see this slapstick bit. “Good. good.” He’s satisfied.

"Aesthetics are ethics" is just the artist's way of saying "the personal is political." Especially in this country. One cannot tell a "whole story," because no such thing exists. Every choice carries the full weight, the full responsibility of your conscious decision to put your focus in one place instead of in another. The script, the stories I include, this blog, the moments I share, the images I post...each one of those things is an aesthetic choice with ethical implications. Which in a place like Israel can be so confusing that it locks you into a paralysis of integrity.


In the past three weeks I discussed "Theatre Ethnography" over coffee with Chen; I planted Sabras plants in the tiny village of Susya in Area C of the West Bank to protest a demolition order on the lone elementary school there; I went to a 150-strong Anglo-Israeli Shabbat dinner celebration in Jerusalem, and listened to a Jewish a cappella troupe; I went to a feminist concert in response to the proposition of recent gender-specific religious laws; I spent the night at a kibbutz; I rehearsed; I went to a crafts fair; I went pubbing...and I didn't write about any of it. I think I'm still finding the story.

I think I'm going to have to come back to Israel.

I honestly thought I’d never say this, but I think I’m turning into a verbatim theatre junkie.

In 2010 I read Anna Deavere Smith’s pioneering work of documentary theatre, Fires in the Mirror, and was so struck by this quote in her prologue that I wrote it down for safekeeping:

I had been trained in the tradition of acting called “psychological realism”. A basic tenet of psychological realism is that characters live inside of you and that you create a lifelike portrayal of the character through a process of realizing your own similarity to the character. When I later became a teacher of acting, I began to become more and more troubled by the self-oriented method. I began to look for ways to engage my students in putting themselves in other people’s shoes. This went against the grain of psychological realism tradition, which was to get the character to walk in the actor’s shoes. It became less and less interesting intellectually to bring the dramatic literature of the world into a classroom of people in their late teens and twenties, and to explore it within the framework of their real lives. Aesthetically it seemed limited, because most of the time the characters all sounded the same. Most characters spoke somewhere inside the rhythmic range of the students. More troubling was that this method left an important bridge out of acting. The spirit of acting is the travel from the self to the other. This “self-based” method seemed to come to a spiritual halt. It saw the self as the ultimate home of the character. To me, the search for character is constantly in motion. It is a quest that moves back and forth between the self and the other.


Now, two years later, I’m finally starting to glimpse the truth of Deavere Smith’s words in action. Meeting with the actors individually to go over the interviews we’ve collected, I’m finding that my greatest handicap here—my inability to understand Hebrew—is surprisingly proving to be an enormous asset when it comes to the performers and their process. Orna gets on stage to read the words of “Yossi” during our first rehearsal and inhabits the character of the hardened, charismatic older man with surprising grace and ease. But of course—she met Yossi, spent several hours recording his words, and then several more hours playing them back and typing them down in 3- or 4- second segments. This may technically be her first reading of the text, but it’s certainly not “cold.”

Yehuda, a young professional actor and—like many Israeli men—an ex-soldier who has seen his own fair share of danger and conflict, is in Orna’s kitchen transcribing our interview with “Shaul,” an ex-combatant who was blinded when he stepped on a landmine during the 6 days’ war in 1967. Yehuda hunkers down over his computer, listening again and again to the same 5-second clip from an interview, like a private investigator trying to deduce a kidnapper’s location from the background noise of a taped phone call. “He has a stop here, where he cannot remember what he was saying, and he is silent for a long time, half a minute. I want to know…why is there the block at this moment?”

I know what Yehuda is feeling. I remember being fascinated by a particularly compelling interview in Lebanon where an ex-fighter spoke of a time when, after retrieving the corpse of a comrade who had been horrifically mutilated, he had made the decision that he and a small group under his command would capture enemy fighters and pour cement over their bodies, burying them alive. The action was never followed through—an older and wiser commanding officer cottoned on to their plans and sent them all on a made-up mission, and then talked them down after they had released some steam. But the simple fact that he had dreamed up this torture and intended to follow through with it was enough to sit heavy on the ex-fighter’s conscience—it scared him how close he himself had been to losing his humanity and succumbing to the barbarity of war. What was amazing about the interview was that each time the decision to dig holes and prepare the cement was mentioned, it was accompanied by a barely perceptible verbal tic: in assigning responsibility for the decision, the word ‘we’ would first be used, followed by a short stutter, and then replaced quickly with ‘I’, like so: “…but I’m telling to you what we— what I decided…” Transcribing the interview, I was amazed at how much was revealed in the tiny self-corrections. These few short syllables contained over 20 years of internal struggle as to where the final responsibility for the cement idea would be placed—in the self, or in the hands of the collective.

I watch Yehuda furiously scribbling a string of the incomprehensible back-stroking Hebrew letters on his notepad. It takes us over 2 hours to transcribe and translate just under three minutes of text. But this isn’t time wasted; Yehuda holds more passion for each sentence than I have ever seen in any other actor on his first day with a script. In almost a decade of directing theater, this is quite possibly the best table-working session that I’ve ever had.

As a teenager, for a stint, I was obsessed with lucid dreams. There’s an exercise I used to do, in the half-hour of no-man’s-land between waking and sleep; a visualization game meant to strengthen whatever muscle we use in conscious dreaming. Picture the room you are in. Try to conjure up every detail, remembering, eyes shut, exactly where everything is, in relation to you. Then, once you’ve pulled up a clear picture, imagine yourself sleeping—or standing—in a different part of the same room. Switch the perspective.

It sounds relatively easy to do, but the brain’s instinctive ability to orient itself accurately in space makes visualizing any viewpoint other than our “real” one incredibly difficult to do. Try it. You’ll notice that, after a bit of struggle, there’s a jolting moment when you “click” in to the new perspective. Suddenly something gives, and you just see it.

Sunday night filmmaker Yariv Mozer meets up with me at the Olive café, to give me a copy of his feature documentary, “My First War,” and to answer any questions I might have about his work. Yariv’s sister-in-law has just had a baby this morning, and he’s headed to Holland for post-production on his next film tomorrow, yet he finds a full hour between hospital visits and packing, just to sit with me.

Yariv’s film, shot while he was actively fighting in the 2006 Lebanese war, follows 5 combatants and one Israeli journalist during and after the conflict. Its reception has been hugely varied depending on the audience. Many critics, especially internationally, see an implicit anti-war message in the film, as the traumatic effects of battle on the soldiers as well as their own misgivings about the conflict are brought to light. Others see its humanization of the IDF combatants as insidiously pushing a pro-Israeli agenda; while within the country, Yariv has been criticized for “exposing” Israel and betraying the country by “showing dissent and weakness.”

“And all of this is in response to the same film!” he says with a gentle smile. I think of my Mleeta blog fiasco and tell him I know the feeling. We spend our time together swapping stories, talking about the limitations and freedoms of our respective mediums, and sharing thoughts on where we hope to take things next. Yariv’s dream, he tells me, is to get into the same room with a Hezbolla fighter, to “discuss things,” on camera. I tell him “Good luck with that.”

The next evening I pop Yariv’s DVD into my computer and listen as his earnest narration guides us through the dirt roads linking Tel Aviv to the Northern border. As the landscape becomes pastoral and the plum trees pull into sight, I start to feel a displaced familiarity;
I’ve seen this landscape before…driving with my friend Karim, along the other side of the fence. The uneasy recognition continues as Yariv guides us through orchards, tents, and the tiny boxlike “war room” where men sit crouched together, tensely barking coordinates as incoming missiles explode in the woods around them. But it is when I see footage of a tank—an establishing shot locating it clearly amidst the recognizable fruit trees before cutting away to a conversation with the loader inside—that the world goes “click.” In a jolting flash, I’m suddenly seeing the exact same—terrifying—piece of machinery that sat ominously in the distance across Fatima’s Gate just 2 months ago. But now I’m inside of it, with my new friend Yariv.

I don’t think I can say much about that moment, except that it was accompanied with an overwhelming sense of sadness. No anger, no judgment, certainly no pat idea or clever epiphany about the “nature of things.” Just a simultaneous connection to two views of one thing that left me with an incredible and sustaining sadness.

There is a clumsy grace in naiveté. I booked an itinerary that would land me in Israel off the back of having just spent 3 months in Beirut, before I had any real idea of what that would stir up for me—socially, emotionally, and even just logistically. I am grateful for my own lack of foresight and the juxtapositions it has left me to grapple with; I have unwittingly stumbled my way into the very heart of this project.

There was a tentative stiffness to my arrival, which inevitably bled into my first conversations. I was, in some sense, bracing myself for Israel. Israel, very understandably, seemed to be bracing itself for me. Orna and I sent out a batch of e-mails a while ago outlining the project and calling for soldiers and ex-soldiers interested in sharing interviews for a theatre piece about their experiences. There was very little response. Once here, she informed me that the reason one of her friends didn’t reply was that he saw “London-based” and “Soldier” in the same sentence and expected me to be doing a BBC 4 exposé on the mistreatment of Palestinians. The true insidiousness of the word “agenda” is beginning to become apparent to me—I can imagine nothing worse than openly sharing my own experiences, hopes, struggles, and pain with someone in a spirit of trust, and then having those words be twisted and used as evidence against me. There’s an elephant in the room; in order to break the ice, there needs to be some kind of dance so that we all know roughly where it’s standing.

Sabine—true to form—has been accelerating this process with her trademark affectionate ribbing, posting things like “How are things in the Occupied Land?” on my facebook wall, leaving me feeling like a gangly adolescent being kissed goodbye by mum on the first day of school (“Mommm! Not in front of my new friends!”). This of course forces the ice-breaking conversations that I need to be having anyways. Just like in Beirut, these conversations, I realize, are mostly for my benefit: I am grappling with new questions, new ideas, a new elephant in a new room. Imagine that elephant living in your home—every new visitor will vigorously bombard you with questions about its diet, its habits, its care…or (even worse) want to share with you everything they ever learned about elephants on the internet. I am reminded of a Salvadorian-American friend who once told me, “I know it’s coming from a good place, but I hate it when my white friends come to me to process their ‘white privilege’ or ‘racism in America.’ It might be the first time you’ve had this conversation, but I’m forced to have it with my lefty white friends all the time. It’s exhausting.” I can imagine just how exhausting, and I’m impressed by Orna’s patience as she narrates her own experiences and perceptions of the “situation” for what I imagine is the umpteen billionth time.

On Monday Orna and I approach the gates of Beit Halochem (House of the Warrior), an activities center for disabled veterans and their families. We explain our project to a lean security guard, who tells us we can’t go past the gates, but are welcome to talk to soldiers going in and out of the center. His aged, grizzled face carried the scars of a ferocious life, and I’m slightly terrified of him. Orna and I chat for a while with a younger veteran on his way to a chess class, and after only a few minutes of this the subject of PTSD comes up, and the once-stern security guard, “Roni” lights up like a disco ball. He launches into a series of stories about war buddies, veterans from the center, huge men, strong men, “gorillas,” childhood best friends reduced to incapable inverts, their lives destroyed by trauma. He is so happy we have come, he says, because these stories need to be told. The anecdotes and descriptions spill from him in a vigorous stream, as unending and vivid as the love that he clearly carries for the men they refer to. Roni, to steal a phrase he used to describe a buddy, “has a heart 80 times too big for his body.” When he speaks, his eyes fill with a youthful light and the skin around them is flushed pink with excitement. Every time a club member passes the guard kiosk, he pauses to introduce us (“This is Daniel. He’s a king, a king!”), excuses himself to exchange a few words, and then is right back into his narration. We stay this way with Roni—nodding, laughing, listening—for a full two hours. He will meet with us during the week, he says, to record the text officially. In the meantime, he escorts us into the center (the rules, apparently, have changed), to chat with one of the blind vets who talked with us on the way in, and set up a time to meet.

What is amazing about this exchange is that it’s the first conversation here that I’ve had about war where politics haven’t come up at all. The most fundamental question between us is not, “where do you stand on the situation.” In fact, even attempting to examine that question could launch us into a minefield of hot topics and sore spots, an obstacle course blocking the way to shared understanding. The fundamental question here is: “do you value my experiences, and respect me as a human being.” Roni, with his gleeful appreciation of serendipity and his passionate concern for his friends, makes it very easy for me to answer that question with: “Definitely, yes.”

I’ve been procrastinating writing a “last” blog entry for Lebanon, because there’s no sense of completion or end; no neat little verbal bow to tie on to the last three months before packing it solidly away into “experiences past.”

We wrote a play based on the ex-fighters’ reflections, ideas, and experiences (check). Mike’s taking it forward to be performed by a pilot group of High School students for the April 13 war commemoration activities (check). I left with an enormous sense of gratitude and respect, and the desire to come back for future collaborations with my amazing friends and project partners here (check). But…nothing feels finished.

When I talk about the last three months, I keep returning to the story of Abu Ali at Khiam. Every day, he returns to the museum and tells the story of his time there. Every day, he tells the story of the 5 years he spent living under traumatic conditions. Every day, he stoops and reaches and twists his ageing body into the stress positions that have marked him since his imprisonment, as if exorcising his trauma through this repeated verbal / physical ritual.

There are stories that the ex-fighters returned to again and again and again. Stories I heard them tell four or five times between our rehearsals and causal meetings and conferences and documentary videos. A young boy snipered on a mission. A priest who granted preemptive forgiveness for killing the enemy. A detested sheik who paid continued visits to a child’s home, demanding more silence than the boy was capable of.

It is not the stories themselves that carry the most power, I am realizing. It is the continued act of telling them. A healing? A shedding? A molting? A ritual. A repeated return to a moment in time. A processing, and perhaps a gradual letting go.

These stories will be told again and again. Abu Ali will continue to spend his days at Khiam. I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to think of any of these actions as a means to an end, because there isn’t necessarily an end in sight. None of these men are waiting around for the day when they, or even the country, will be fully “healed.” They are simply engaged in the process of healing. Perhaps that’s as close to healed as we ever get.


Photo Credit: (c) Bilal Kabalan

The protests in Tahrir Square have been the hot topic in Lebanon since last week; in the Choucair household this was compounded by the fact that Sabine was in Cairo, and meant to be giving a clown workshop, when the demonstrations broke out. Her current facebook page is a bit like a sociological debate on the value of art in a revolutionary society. A couple of days they actually held clown improv. sessions before and/or after hitting the streets in their “high tech clown noses” (read: gas masks). Other days this was impossible. Finally Sabine put her foot down and canceled the classes, to the dismay of many of her students I’m sure. For the workshop to have value, there needed to be consistent attendance, something that was impossible in this context.


Back home in Beirut, I was having a similar debate with an Egyptian friend, Mohammed, a filmmaker doing a year-long plastic arts course here in Lebanon. His struggle was that he felt “useless, like a coward” staying in Beirut when all of his friends were protesting in Tahrir. His classmates here were worried that if he went to Cairo, he’d never come back, wasting the opportunity to graduate from his course. I was (and have been) feeling a bit saturated with the topic of war and conflict, which gave me an impish audacity to speak recklessly on what was clearly a sensitive subject. “You’re a filmmaker right? Take your camera and make something creative to bring back here and show.” Mohammed said he was against this, against “using” a real and difficult situation to fuel his art. I told him I saw it the other way around: he’d be doing something tangible—spreading awareness in Lebanon and worldwide instead of sacrificing his artistic future to add one more body to the pile of protesters. Another friend joined in: “Protesting is only one way to help Egypt. Egypt needs thinkers, needs artists. If you throw away your opportunities here…” She trailed off. Mohammed redoubled with a point about how in certain situations, engaging the mind wasn’t enough. One had to engage the body. I’m a physical theatre artist, I’m all about engaging the body, so I know what Mohammed was getting at…but like I said, I was feeling impish. I laid into him with a Socratic line of questioning: “What does it mean to engage the body?” “Is showing up enough?” “What if they use violence against you, do you use it back?” “If you don’t use violence back, are you just sacrificing yourself to prove your courage and commitment?” “If you don’t fight back, does anything change?” “If you do fight back, is that tantamount to choosing war as the only option?” “Is there a smarter way to fight, beyond simply ‘engaging’ your body by showing up?” “Is there another way to engage it, in other more effective actions?”

Gandhi and MLK might be rolling in their graves at this point. I’m not sure I have any answers, but I do know that many in my generation struggle with the efficacy of protests in general…I think of the G8 rallies and how similar they looked to this “brand new” Occupy Wall Street movement. I think of the millions who marched against war on my birthday in 2003, and wonder how much change that day concretely manifested. I think of the stories that the ex-fighters have been telling me about their pre-war experiences, and I am chilled and thrilled by their incredible description of the rallies, the protests, the marches they took part in; the tremendous potential energy of a common cause. But it’s just that—potential energy. Whether or not we gather it is almost besides the point; consciously—and creatively—figuring out what to do with it is the bigger and more difficult question.

Friday kicks off a 3-day conference hosted by the Lebanese American University entitled: Healing the Wounds of History: Addressing the Roots of Violence. I am here primarily to see Ziad, Moheiddine, and Assaad speak about their experiences during and after the war; but am curious to see what the rest of the conference will bring. I’m particularly interested to see how last week’s clash between opposing political groups on LAU’s campus is going to be incorporated into the day’s program. If ever there was a context for exploring where theory meets practice, it seems, this would be it.

                
The clashes are succinctly but sufficiently addressed in the keynote speech, but not mentioned thereafter. While some impulsive and intuitive part of me is disappointed that there hasn’t been a drastic and responsive reworking of the conference planning, the rest of me understands that this conference was organized months ago, and that its function is to be forward-thinking and global, not immediate and reactive. Perhaps artists have a hard time with suppressing that little impulsive voice, I muse, because we spend so much of our energy listening for it—intuitive response forms the heart of creativity.

I’m not the best at absorbing academic speeches. Most of the time the polysyllabic words kind of wash over me in a general marinade which I seep in, without really catching all of the facts and figures. What I come away with is more often an emotional sense of the thing than a practical and applicable point. But once in a while you get a zinger—someone whose ideas are at once familiar enough to engage you and new enough to excite you. Reina Sarkis is my zinger. A psychoanalyst doing a doctorate on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, Reina spends her fifteen minutes talking about human compulsive behavior in response to trauma, and how this manifests and is enacted on a larger scale by entire communities and societies who have suffered the trauma of war.

Reina’s talk is exciting because she assumes the parallel relationship between microcosm and macrocosm (by looking at patterns of individual psychology and applying them to understanding collective psychology), an assumption that a lot of my own thinking is based on. Recently, as I’ve read and learned more about psychology and trauma, I’ve come to understand the importance of storytelling in constructing a coherent narrative out of our experiences in order to build our sense of who we are and what we want. Experiences don’t happen for us in isolation, they happen to us in the context of a larger story, an arbitrary grouping of events that we have decided to give a specific significance to by placing them in relation to one another. These stories have builds and outcomes that allow us to see how our experiences have shaped us into new people with new expectations or characteristics or traits or desires. These stories are enormously powerful, because they determine how we feel and what we do next. And WE create them; in this way, we create ourselves.

Ever since my psychedelic teenage years, I’ve reflexively drawn connections between individuals and collectives, so of course all of my learning re: personal narrative has had me thinking about my career choice, and examining the role and responsibilities of theatre artists (as well as novelists, filmmakers, and all other storytellers) in constructing cultural narratives. Up until now I’ve seen our work as a conscious but somewhat organic process, giving quite a lot of trust over to that “intuitive” creative voice; putting impulse in the driver’s seat, if you will.

Reina says something that snaps me awake: “Following trauma, we engage in compulsive behavior, often recreating the traumatic event in an attempt to change the outcome. On an individual level we see this as people reconstruct the traumatic event again and again in their own lives and relationships. At a societal level we see this through politics, media, and in the arts…” Reina reminds us that coming to the same situation with the exact same tools we had at the point of trauma, with nothing new to add, and expecting a different outcome is literally pathological. Cycling through old stories. Reenacting the past. Compulsive. Impulsive. Hearing Reina’s talk, I gain a new appreciation for the premium that is put on originality in the arts—at writing new and original narratives, if you will. I also am forced to take a second look at my blind trust in “the creative impulse.” Impulses come from many places, not all of them transformative or even constructive.

I ran through my idea for a narrative structure of the writing piece with Sabine, and her response to my proposed ending was that it was cheesy. Cheesy means “overdone,” which to an artist spells unoriginality, so Sabine’s frank guidance had already forced me to look beyond the immediate and obvious. But Reina has just taught me why this search for new stories is so important.

Getting on With Life (Lebanon)

Some of Sabine’s filmmaker friends are using the apartment to shoot a comedy pilot, so I’ve been hiding out in whichever room isn’t being filmed in, alongside all of the excess equipment, snacks, and techies on cigarette breaks.


At about 7pm, two of the boys come in with tequila shots to celebrate getting through most of the day. I bust out the peanut puffs. We’re in proper chillax mode.

I’ve been between books and my computer, trying to understand the roots of Tuesday’s clash between LAU students that left 8 people injured—4 badly enough to be taken to hospital. Here’s a potentially more “neutral” site’s version of the same story (I think of all my pre-blog musings that never got published, and feel for these poor “NOW Lebanon” guys with their self-imposed brevity).

These 20-year-olds are just two years on from the 18-year-olds we’re writing a play for. These are the small sparks of the otherwise “cold” war that Assaad keeps referring to. Our other collaborator has canceled his appointments this week to go to LAU personally to be involved with follow-up. All of a sudden Traboulsi’s history book doesn’t seem so dry; apparently I just needed some immediacy to engage.

Syria is key. The so-called Cedar Revolution in the wake of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005 ultimately led to the end of Syria’s official military presence in Lebanon (although arguably they still have considerable unofficial influence via Hezbollah). The withdrawal and its aftermath effectively bisected the Lebanese political landscape into what has been coined the “March 8” and “March 14” coalitions. To speak quite broadly (for more nuance you’ll have to hit Wikipedia), The March 14 Parties are pro-Hariri and anti- the current Syrian regime, while Hezbollah-led March 8 is largely in support of it.

The kids who clashed were Amal (March 8) and Future Movement (March 14). My question in all of this is: “If Syria’s regime topples, or if the situation disintegrates into full-blown civil war (which, depending on your definition, it might already have done), what are the potential repercussions in Lebanon?”

It’s a strange question to be asking from my desk at Sabine’s high-rise flat, sipping my beer as the one-man cast of the comedy serial flits by me in heavy makeup and drag. The Guardian says that 3 anti-Syrian activists have been abducted outside of Beirut, allegedly by Syrian Embassy officials based in Lebanon. But I had to go hunting to find that information, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Wissam, the production company general manager, comes back with the bowl of peanut munchies and tells me I have to help finish them because he’s the only one snacking. I ask him if what’s happening in Syria is going to affect Lebanon. “Affect? Of course. But there’s no way of knowing how.” He explains that clashes like these are not uncommon at Universities, notably in the context of campus elections. While talk of political parties is technically banned from the parlance of campus elections, students still run—and vote—along national party lines. This surprises me; I try to imagine equivalent campaigns at my own University in the States: “Vote Wendy Smith - Wellesley College Republican Candidate.” No, it’s just too bizarre.

But, again: immediacy. Politics have immediate and possibly dangerous effects here, which might make strongly self-identifying along party lines something that happens younger and more often. At our last writing rehearsal I learned that a lot of families (“most”) still own guns, as there were no official disarmament procedures put in place after the war: “Some parties still have their artillery.”

On the other hand, there’s also a mind-tricking distance. I’ve been glued to my computer while in the other room the director calls “Speed” and “Action,” and the show, quite literally, goes on. Is Wissam worried about Syria? He smiles. “You know in 2006 when the war was happening in Beirut, people were going out clubbing in the mountains. There are problems everywhere, all the time. For a year and half we lived without a government. Any other country, can you imagine if they had no government? But we just kept living. We’re used to getting on with life.”

I laugh and shake my head. He holds the bowl out to me. “Peanut puff?’

Glued Pages (Lebanon)

There’s a collage of images gathering in my head. It has something to do with history, and with books.

History books, lets start there: a month after purchasing it, I’m still only fifty-odd pages into A History of Modern Lebanon. The words seem to spill off the page and bounce off of my eyes, never making it anywhere near my brain. Ottoman, qa’im maqamiya, muqata ‘ji, Druze-Ottoman, Druze-Christian, overlord, clash, sharecropping… I skip ahead a century past the 1920s. Turkey, Syria, depression, annexation, Francophile, great depression, general strike… place names and concepts I recognize. I’m still having a hard time absorbing it, but it’s easier.

I’m at the opening of a hip underground theatre-bar in Hamra. Movie seats line the walls and the brightly lit room is all aluminum furniture and pastel highlights. Disco. A new friend is telling me about her high school history class. “Every teacher has to deal with this question: what happened after? Because the national curriculum-the officially recognized history book-stops after independence in 1943. Every teacher deals with the questions differently. Or not at all.” Later I am speaking with an actor about theatre in Lebanon. We exhaust the subject, and I do that awkward thing where I look around and comment on how nice the décor is. “Yeah,” the actor replies, “we always have this certain nostalgia for the 70s.” It never occurred to me that war would freeze time in this way, erasing any fashion trends between 1975 and 1990. But of course. I guess if you’re looking for bread to buy and hiding in a bomb shelter, you won’t be too fussed about getting the right ripped flannel to achieve that perfect “grunge” look.

Somehow this comment about the 70s paints a clearer picture of the years that followed than anything I’ve read in a history book so far.


Driving to the first rehearsal, Mike tells me of the day he discovered glue on a student’s English reader. “That’s too bad,” he said, “did you spill it?” She shook her head, “They come like this when we get them,” she explained. Mike was puzzled. A section of the book was intentionally glued shut? “Or cut out,” another student offered helpfully, showing how in his reader, those pages were missing altogether. The other students pulled out their readers to show him. All glued or cut. “What are those pages?” Mike asked, “Does anyone have a reader that doesn’t have the pages cut?”

Something Fateh said when we met at the UNHCR my first week here keeps sliding through my thoughts: “…people here are turning the pages of history without reading them…”

At the rehearsal, one of the ex-fighters is talking about a military operation he took part in to rescue a friend who was bleeding to death on the side of the road, mutilated at a checkpoint. The boys (Mike and Charbel—who I’m already starting to think of as “my boys,”) are rapt, and the status has suddenly flip-flopped as we’ve gone from a room of “workshop facilitators” and “participants” to a room of streetwise storytellers and attentive young listeners. There is something happening here that I hadn’t anticipated. The “intergenerational transmission of memory” isn’t something that we’ll arrive at later when the team takes the piece on to tour to high schools. It’s something that is happening here, now.

I was right about Elias Khoury’s Yalo, it was a fantastic, fast read. So many quotable passages, here’s just one of them:

The truth is that Yalo covered himself in night because he didn't feel safe. When the war ended, it left a great gap in his life. The war shut up shop and the fighters' vague fear began. The war had been like a barricade behind which they had hidden. When the barricade fell, each one of us felt naked. The most difficult thing that can happen to a person is to find himself stark naked the way God made him. This is something Mme Randa taught me. The lady would take off her clothes when her lust began fluttering its wings in her eyes. She would stand naked in front of the mirror and look at her brown skin that sparkled with lust. And when he'd finished, she'd cover herself with the quilt and refuse to get out of bed until Yalo left the room, because she was embarrassed by her nakedness. And we, sir, were like Mme Randa: when the war had finished, we felt embarrassed by our nakedness and went looking for something to cover us up.

Another quote, this one from Hadi Zaccak, director of the Lebanese documentary A History Lesson: “Amnesia leaves us making a civil war every 15 to 20 years. This is our history.”

Write. Read. Turn. Page. Skip. Book. Cut. Novel. Script. Glue. Write. The collage isn’t getting any clearer.

I think of the ex-fighters and what it means for them to write this play. Talk about brave.

Semantics (Lebanon)

Every day I’m reminded how tiny and interconnected Beirut is. Sabine just happens to know both of the guys whose CVs fit the bill, so she calls them over to her flat, saving me the taxi rides to and from some arbitrary café. Sabouny has a huge workshop space that takes up half of the apartment, which we’ll use to rehearse…if I let her continue to play secretary, I muse, I’ll never leave this flat again.

I meet Charbel first, and am immediately comforted by his attraction to specificity, to details. He adds some of his own questions to the more philosophical ones that Assaad and I drew up last week: “We want to ask what daily life was like. What did they eat, and how? During the war, everyone ate tuna in cans…” He mimes pulling the lid off of a tuna tin, his shoulders automatically hunching, giving a sense of how precious this small imaginary feast would have been.

Later that evening Mike comes by. His credentials are perfect for facilitating rehearsals—he’s on track to do a PHD in expressive arts therapy and social engagement, which is basically shorthand for guiding non-artists through processing things creatively, and applying the creative product to a larger social context. Now I’ve never considered our process—-or any creative process—-therapeutic for its own sake; obviously by creating we are growing and changing as people, no doubt, but something about centralizing that process as a main objective makes me pull back, and always has. So I harp on the “social engagement” aspect and Mike agrees that, yes, we are working as a team to bring a product to Lebanese High School students; we are not doing this primarily so that we “grow as people and process the war.” I know I am being a bit pedantic to insist on this, but for some reason the point of focus is critical. We are a collaborative team, working together towards a goal that is external to us. All of the other stuff (our own personal journeys yada yada) will happen, but somehow I think it will happen most effectively if we keep our own focus on the audience; as will (obviously) the actual social change. Once Mike has nodded agreement enough times for me to feel safe that we’re on the same page, we’re freed up to start speaking practically. We talk about different writing and mime exercises to generate movement sequences and text. I realize that share an enormous repertoire of identical techniques that are just named differently. What I call “introducing a random provocation,” he calls “de-centering”; what I call “warming up” he calls “engaging the body”; and (I realize, as the conversation goes on), what he calls “expressive arts therapy,” I call “devising.” We’re good to go.

I posted the call for one artist, and now I’m in a bind. Charbel is a writer, and from the hour I spent with him, I really trust his ability to probe, listen, and craft. Mike is going to be stellar at steering a process that generates the most and best material with the ex-fighters. Product and process. An impossible choice--you need both. I call and ask how they’d feel about splitting the stipend for expenses. They’re both fine with it, and we have a dream team.

The next day I’m digesting my feelings about “art therapy” with Sabine. She says she gets where I’m coming from. “Everything is therapy. The question is, what kind of work do you need to do right now? Work on yourself, or work outside of yourself?” Both, in a way, will accomplish both. But having a clear point of focus can keep us from getting lost. I know I’m the kind of person who gets muddled and confused if I get too insular. I can feel it happening even now, as the narrowing of focus on this project has taken me out of offices and cafes and glued me to the internet liaising with banks and funders. I’ve been at my computer for days now and am getting a bit stir-crazy. I gotta get out of this apartment.

Excerpt, 'What it is Like to Go to War'

The following is an excerpt from Karl Marlantes' What it is Like to Go to War (highly recommended reading, thanks to Captain Jack for the tip). Marlantes is an American Combat Veteran who fought in Vietnam. This passage gives another perspective on "holy war," something I've been thinking about since my trip to Mleeta. Particularly interesting is Marlantes' suggestion that embracing a spiritual aspect to combat mentally prepares and protects soldiers from trauma, and helps with reintegration and return. This makes a lot of sense, as much of the work in psychology around trauma seems to have to do with constructing a personal narrative which gives meaning to our otherwise random suffering. In a way, it makes sense that the more painful the suffering, the more profound the meaning must be in order for us to accept and integrate the traumatic experience into our life story.

"Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four comon components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity.

Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space? Witness the demons of Tibetan Buddhism, ritual torture practiced by certain Native American tribes, the darker side of voodoo, or the cruel martyrdom of saints of all religions. Ritual torture or martyrdom can be either meaningless and terrible suffering or a profound religious experience, depending upon what the sufferer brings to the situation. The horror remains the same.

Combat is precisely such a situation.

Our young warriors are raised in possibly the only culture on the planet that thinks death is an option. Given this, it is no surprise that not only they but many of their ostensible religious guides, like the chaplain with the booze, enter the temple of Mars unprepared. Not only is such comfort too often delusional; it tends to numb one to spiritual reality and growth. Far worse, it has serious psychological and behavioral consequences.

To avoid, or at least mitigate, these consequences, warriors have to be able to bring meaning to this chaotic experience, i.e., an understanding of their situation at a deeper level than proficiency in killing. It can help them get through combat with their sanity relatively intact. It can help them from doing more harm than they need to. It is also a critical component in their ability to adjust when they return home."

~ Karl Marlantes, What It is Like to Go to War, 2011