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Reviving the first casualty of war
REVIEW: LETTERS FROM HOME: VOICES FROM IRAQ
Theatro Technis
IN ages past, history was written by the winners; now anyone with a blog or a Facebook account can carve the runes of time.
Everyone’s a chronicler.
The proliferation of opinion is, of course, a mixed blessing. No one is more aware of this than director Jimmy Bohr, who has trawled through reams of emails, postings, and letters from American soldiers in Iraq
in search of “the warrior’s truth”.
Bohr, a drama professor at Ohio State University, has spent two years compiling and editing material from the front for Letters Home, a verbatim reading performed by students from his faculty.
There are some fascinating insights: the young tank gunner who advises not to shoot insurgents at night because “it makes it too much like a video game”; the “death letters” that soldiers write for loved ones in case they fall in battle; or the crushing bureaucracy that instructs soldiers to keep peace and kill in the same breath.
One serviceman records the graffiti in the camp latrines where eagles, the Twin Towers, and speeches by Martin Luther King take precedence over any “For a good time” invitations. Everybody, no matter how close they are to the conflict, watches CNN to find out how they’re doing.
Letters Home is billed as a work-in-progress and the holes do occasionally show. Bohr’s selected testimonies are balanced, though often in harsh black or white, “pro” or “anti” sentiments. There is a predominance of conscientious naifs who have suddenly realised war is ugly, and a lack of focused political
comment and, obversely, of desensitised jobsworths who see it as another way of
earning a dollar.
The history of war has always been a selective process; Bohr’s play shows, through its successes and its failures, that it must remain so.
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