Theater of War - modern warriors find solace in ancient tales

[Ivan Seeking]

At military bases around the nation, performances of Greek drama are linking ancient and modern warriors in an understanding of war's pain and mental agony. Jeffrey Brown reports.

...The concept is simple. Four actors read scenes from plays written in the 4th century B.C. by Sophocles, who, not incidentally, had himself been a general in the Athenian army.

...And we scheduled the town hall meeting to go on after the performance, just thinking that maybe a discussion could be had. And when we scheduled, for 45 minutes lasted over three-and-a-half-hours. And there was a certain point in the evening where I had my aha moment, where I saw almost 50 people lined up at the microphone with comments. And each person who came up to the microphone quoted lines from the plays...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june10/ptsd_02-03.html

 

[BenVitale]

It's a great concept.

Soldiers can identify with characters and would feel less alone ... the fact that Sophocles was himself a general in the Athenian army helps a lot.

Soldiers are reluctant to seek treatments if and when they really need them because of the stigma of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and they also worry that they might be passed over for promotion or viewed as weak.

Since soldiers don't like to talk to a shrink and seek therapy, this theater would help them to open up and could reduce stigma and ultimately help veterans seek these treatments


That's a wonderful way of supporting our troops.

 

[Philosoraptor]

This book, "Achilles in Vietnam" by Jonathan Shay, was recommended to me by one of my Greek professors once:

Shay is a psychiatrist specializing in treating Vietnam veterans with chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome. In this provocative monograph, he relates their experiences to Homer's portrait of Achilles in The Illiad. War, he argues, generates rage because of its intrinsic unfairness. Only one's special comrades can be trusted. The death of Patroklos drove Achilles first into passionate grief, then into berserk wrath. Shay establishes convincing parallels to combat in Vietnam, where the war was considered meaningless and mourning for dead friends was thwarted by an indifferent command structure. He convincingly recommends policies of unit rotation and unit "griefwork"--official recognition of combat losses--as keys to sustaining what he calls a moral existence during war's human encounters. The alternatives are unrestrained revenge-driven behavior, endless reliving of the guilt such behavior causes and the ruin of good character. Shay's ideas merit attention by soldiers and scholars alike.

Shay works from an intriguing premise: that the study of the great Homeric epic of war, The Iliad, can illuminate our understanding of Vietnam, and vice versa. Along the way, he compares the battlefield experiences of men like Agamemnon and Patroclus with those of frontline grunts, analyzes the berserker rage that overcame Achilles and so many American soldiers alike, and considers the ways in which societies ancient and modern have accounted for and dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder---a malady only recently recognized in the medical literature, but well attested in Homer's pages. The novelist Tim O'Brien, who has written so affectingly about his experiences in combat, calls Shay's book "one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam war." He's right.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684813211/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Fascinating! As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun.

Btw, Philosoraptor, I had to LOL when I first saw your username.

 

[Philosoraptor]

Fascinating! As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun.

Btw, Philosoraptor, I had to LOL when I first saw your username.

Haha thank you! I can't claim credit for the pun (a friend of mine thought it up) but it's way too good to pass up.

And truly, the lament of Ecclesiastes is fitting: "Vanitas vanitatum." Thanks for the link to the story, it is a good one. PBS is wonderful.

"Solomon saith: 'There is no new thing upon the earth.' So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion."
--Francis Bacon