The Theatre of War

"This is a remarkable book by Bryan Doerries about how he managed to convince the US military, which was very sceptical at first, to allow him to stage plays of Sophocles and other Greek tragedies before audiences of recently returned veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. These plays are remarkable. Sophocles, the author, was himself an Athenian general and wrote them to speak to the varying issues which veterans grappled with on a daily basis: the anger, the rage, the sorrow, the remorse, and the shame that each soldier so often encountered at home. Doerries saw these plays as a way of providing a collective catharsis to these returning veterans and they proved remarkable. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He describes, in his book, scenes where, temporarily, the military hierarchy is allowed to dissolve in the discussions that take place in the wake of the plays. Men are allowed to say things that otherwise would have been unsayable. The results can be incredibly challenging, but it is clear that some of the men find that it’s the first time they are really able to face their own feelings, and for some of them, it starts the healing journey of the kind that Ed Tick describes in War and the Soul. In a sense, what Doerries is doing is providing a way to operationalize and apply the insights that Ed Tick advocates in his book. Those two books go very well together. He went into prisons as well. I think, again, the core insight is that so much of the way we think about therapy is that it is an individual who is struggling, or is depressed or anxious – that it’s their personal problem and they need a therapist that fixes them at an individual level and on an individual basis, a little like a machine that needs to be fixed by a mechanic. But actually it is much more helpful to recognize that many of the problems we face as individuals are a reflection of the collective dysfunction, particularly in the institutions which are founded to apply organized violence. It’s no wonder that the people who participate in them show signs of breakdown. The work of somebody like Bryan Doerries is incredible. It has reached people and individuals in these institutions in ways that nobody else has. I noticed others doing similar work. There are companies in the US and in the UK who are adopting a similar approach. I really hope that his book will help to promote that, not just for his company, but for many others, in the years to come. Certainly in Britain, we get very uncomfortable with words like ‘spirituality’ or the ‘soul.’ I very consciously avoided using those words in my book. But actually the kinds of journeys that many veterans described, as they tried to come to terms with their trauma, were incredibly spiritual. In Aftershock, I wrote about a veteran of the Falklands war called Gus Hales, who suffers from terrible PTSD and embraces meditation as his vehicle for coming to terms with what happened to him, his losses and learning to function again. He underwent a profound spiritual awakening as a result of his trauma. I also wrote about a sniper who served in the Royal Marines in Afghanistan. He talked about his worst moments, where he was on verge of committing suicide, what he called a ‘meeting God’ experience, when he was suddenly filled with this sense of peace, reassurance, and tranquillity. This numinosity suggested that all will be well. That was only a brief sense that he had, but it was enough to stop him from taking his own life, and start the process of gradually rebuilding his life. In the final chapter of the book, I look at the work of therapists and psychiatrists in Scotland who were using very spiritual tools, drawn from Native American traditions, for treating veterans. This included encouraging them to admit the help of the power animal, a kind of a spirit guide, to help them confront their past. There was a veteran of the British army who has a jaguar now, an invisible jaguar that follows him everywhere he goes. Certainly, in our secular society, it is very easy for people to raise their eyebrows when we start talking in these terms. I found that many of these soldiers have suffered so much that they’re far more open to exploring these realms than they might have before they went to war."