Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
September 19, 2008
Pg. B1
By Clyde Haberman
They were battered, body and soul, these two combat veterans.
One had a foot wound that was painful and rank. But what really traumatized him was a sense of betrayal after his comrades had left him behind and moved on to the next battle. The other man fell into such a dark emotional hole that he came unglued. He went so far as to kill animals, thinking in his delusion that he was murdering commanding officers he thought had done him wrong.
That these soldiers were fictional creations was but a detail for Maj. Joseph Geraci. He had a good idea of what the two men were going through: Philoctetes, he with the foot injury, and Ajax, the unhinged slaughterer, both title characters in plays that the Greek tragedian Sophocles wrote 2,400 years ago.
“Divine madness,” the chorus says of Ajax’s torment. Major Geraci recognized it as something else, what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Having done two tours in Afghanistan as an infantry officer, he knows a thing or two about the subject.
No malady remotely Ajax-like ever seized him. Still, he said, “for a while I’d jump at loud noises.”
“Or there’d be uncertainty in large groups, with people you don’t know.” So as he listened the other day to the ordeals of the two veterans of the long Trojan War, he said, “I was definitely crying during parts of it.”
These days, Major Geraci teaches psychology at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He and Col. Donna Brazil, the academy’s director of psychology studies, brought 11 cadets to the city to hear professional actors read from the Sophocles plays in a theater of the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center.
Most of the cadets were seniors. Nine of the 11 were women, an intriguing imbalance that reflected the gender breakdown among psychology majors, Colonel Brazil said. But men or women, all can reasonably expect to find themselves in Afghanistan or Iraq before too long. “Anything that helps to prepare them for where they’re going is good,” the colonel said.
In the Philoctetes tale, the Trojan War has been raging for nine years, a detail that was not lost on Cadet Josh Jones. “Well, we’re almost there,” he said. “We’re at seven.”
In the end, war is war, and it is never pretty. What Sophocles had to say is “still on point all these years later,” Cadet Sade Williams said.
Bryan Doerries’s feelings exactly.
Mr. Doerries is a classicist by training and a theater director by vocation. He merged the two fields in an enterprise called the Philoctetes Project. He translates Sophocles for modern audiences, emphasizing plays centered on war and its shattering effects on the men who wage it and the families that grapple with its consequences.
IN San Diego last month, he arranged a dramatic reading of “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” before an audience dominated by 250 marines. The 150 or so people gathered at Juilliard were more varied. The actors, who included seasoned hands like David Strathairn, Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp, read to an amalgam of war veterans, West Pointers, psychologists, social service professionals and drama majors. One Juilliard student, a former marine named Adam Driver, joined the professional actors on stage.
“Ancient Greek drama was a form of storytelling and therapy for war veterans by war veterans,” Mr. Doerries told the audience. Sophocles himself had been a general. Because all Athenian men were expected to serve in the military, Mr. Doerries said, audiences were no doubt filled with vets. “We think these plays were a way to reintegrate soldiers back into society,” he said.
Two and a half millenniums later, little has changed when it comes to the needs of soldiers coming home. That was the consensus of a panel discussion that followed the readings.
Men and women are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, in many instances emotionally scarred or horribly disfigured, only to find a veterans’ system that is stressed to the max. “The post-combat needs of service members are obviously very, very high,” said James W. Forrester, director of policy for an organization called Veterans for America.
Sophocles was Mr. Doerries’s way to underline the issue, which obviously affects all Americans, civilians and military alike. “A modern play about Vietnam,” he said, “wouldn’t have the effect of an ancient narrative that draws attention to the fact that P.T.S.D., even if it wasn’t called that, was very much a problem that plagued humanity from way back.”
Can simply watching a play be therapeutic? One panelist, Dr. Jonathan Shay, expressed skepticism. Dr. Shay is a psychiatrist who has specialized in combat trauma. “The most potent healing function of the arts,” he said, “is the doing of it,” not the viewing of it.
Major Geraci, for one, did not agree.
From his seat in the second row, he cried out, “It helped today.”
September 19, 2008
Pg. B1
By Clyde Haberman
They were battered, body and soul, these two combat veterans.
One had a foot wound that was painful and rank. But what really traumatized him was a sense of betrayal after his comrades had left him behind and moved on to the next battle. The other man fell into such a dark emotional hole that he came unglued. He went so far as to kill animals, thinking in his delusion that he was murdering commanding officers he thought had done him wrong.
That these soldiers were fictional creations was but a detail for Maj. Joseph Geraci. He had a good idea of what the two men were going through: Philoctetes, he with the foot injury, and Ajax, the unhinged slaughterer, both title characters in plays that the Greek tragedian Sophocles wrote 2,400 years ago.
“Divine madness,” the chorus says of Ajax’s torment. Major Geraci recognized it as something else, what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Having done two tours in Afghanistan as an infantry officer, he knows a thing or two about the subject.
No malady remotely Ajax-like ever seized him. Still, he said, “for a while I’d jump at loud noises.”
“Or there’d be uncertainty in large groups, with people you don’t know.” So as he listened the other day to the ordeals of the two veterans of the long Trojan War, he said, “I was definitely crying during parts of it.”
These days, Major Geraci teaches psychology at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He and Col. Donna Brazil, the academy’s director of psychology studies, brought 11 cadets to the city to hear professional actors read from the Sophocles plays in a theater of the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center.
Most of the cadets were seniors. Nine of the 11 were women, an intriguing imbalance that reflected the gender breakdown among psychology majors, Colonel Brazil said. But men or women, all can reasonably expect to find themselves in Afghanistan or Iraq before too long. “Anything that helps to prepare them for where they’re going is good,” the colonel said.
In the Philoctetes tale, the Trojan War has been raging for nine years, a detail that was not lost on Cadet Josh Jones. “Well, we’re almost there,” he said. “We’re at seven.”
In the end, war is war, and it is never pretty. What Sophocles had to say is “still on point all these years later,” Cadet Sade Williams said.
Bryan Doerries’s feelings exactly.
Mr. Doerries is a classicist by training and a theater director by vocation. He merged the two fields in an enterprise called the Philoctetes Project. He translates Sophocles for modern audiences, emphasizing plays centered on war and its shattering effects on the men who wage it and the families that grapple with its consequences.
IN San Diego last month, he arranged a dramatic reading of “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” before an audience dominated by 250 marines. The 150 or so people gathered at Juilliard were more varied. The actors, who included seasoned hands like David Strathairn, Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp, read to an amalgam of war veterans, West Pointers, psychologists, social service professionals and drama majors. One Juilliard student, a former marine named Adam Driver, joined the professional actors on stage.
“Ancient Greek drama was a form of storytelling and therapy for war veterans by war veterans,” Mr. Doerries told the audience. Sophocles himself had been a general. Because all Athenian men were expected to serve in the military, Mr. Doerries said, audiences were no doubt filled with vets. “We think these plays were a way to reintegrate soldiers back into society,” he said.
Two and a half millenniums later, little has changed when it comes to the needs of soldiers coming home. That was the consensus of a panel discussion that followed the readings.
Men and women are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, in many instances emotionally scarred or horribly disfigured, only to find a veterans’ system that is stressed to the max. “The post-combat needs of service members are obviously very, very high,” said James W. Forrester, director of policy for an organization called Veterans for America.
Sophocles was Mr. Doerries’s way to underline the issue, which obviously affects all Americans, civilians and military alike. “A modern play about Vietnam,” he said, “wouldn’t have the effect of an ancient narrative that draws attention to the fact that P.T.S.D., even if it wasn’t called that, was very much a problem that plagued humanity from way back.”
Can simply watching a play be therapeutic? One panelist, Dr. Jonathan Shay, expressed skepticism. Dr. Shay is a psychiatrist who has specialized in combat trauma. “The most potent healing function of the arts,” he said, “is the doing of it,” not the viewing of it.
Major Geraci, for one, did not agree.
From his seat in the second row, he cried out, “It helped today.”