Strange day today; woke up late, couldn’t find my eyeglasses; couldn’t find my prosthetic brain. The omens were bad: I couldn’t find a sheep to augur its entrails, my Tarot deck disappeared, and the I Ching delivered the 5th gua: Hsu (Waiting). This is basically a good prospect, as there is an implication of nourishment.

The image is:

Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of Waiting.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.

The “superior man” refers to a man who is wise and waits for a propitious moment and since nourishment implies more than food and drink I decided to write about a new stage venture started by some Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are trying to work through some issues while educating Americans to what sometimes happens in war.

LOS ANGELES - The house lights go down and the stage lights come up on The Wolf, the first production of VetStage, a non-profit theater company run by veterans of the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It opens with a funeral: a Roman Catholic priest preparing to deliver a eulogy for a US soldier killed by a roadside bomb.

Quickly, the scene changes and we're transported to a group therapy session under way at military mental institution. It's here
that we meet our two main characters. Both are members of the US Marine Corps facing court martial. The first, a female soldier accused of killing a fellow marine after he raped her. The second, for massacring an entire Iraqi family in their home.

The therapy session does not go well.

"A lot of f---ed-up shit happened in combat, that's what I think, Supershrink," a third solider in the therapy session tells the military psychiatrist. "You know what, I'm tired, so why don't we move on?"

Returning vets always bring a lot of issues with them. During this round of war America has been made a lot more aware of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder than was the case in past wars. After WWII, a lot of people were concerned about millions of troops with hair-trigger combat reflexes all suddenly being turned loose on a country, and GIs were given a series of lectures before release that tried to explain the phenomenon, and how they had changed during war. There was an effort to ease these veterans back into society.

I don’t think there was as much effort taken during Korea and Viet Nam. Basically it was final pay, “Thanks a lot. Bye.” Our society is still paying the price for Nam-era troops who didn’t adjust.

It’s a problem again today, since most vets returning don’t even get the “Thanks a lot.” Mr Bu$h, who’s been seen with more uniformed troops than GEN Pace, Chief of the General Staff, seems to feel that they’ll settle back into civilian life fine, just the way he did after his stint in the Texas Air National Guard. He’s so confident of this, in fact, that he’s spent the last few years cutting back on the VA’s budget. After all, he transitioned back in just fine, where’s the worry?

Last year fellow vet Bulldog wrote:

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the one of the most common health issues to affect troops who have deployed to Iraq to fight. Yet, not enough funding to take care of and treat these soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines has been allocated. As of 2004 and according to an article in Psychiatric News, by the American Psychiatric Association,

…less than 9 percent of the VA health research budget is dedicated to mental illness and substance use, even though 35 percent to 40 percent of VA patients need mental health care.

And in the face of mounting numbers of injured solders and a malAdministration that thinks of soldiers as disposable razors VetStage’s play notes:

Near the end of the first act, the two soldiers break out of the mental institution, but they can't lie low - violence seems to follow them wherever they go.

This is how the play's main character describes the massacre he perpetrated to his local priest: "They were sheep," he says, "and I am a wolf and I did what wolves do, and that's what I told 'em, and that's why they keep me locked up."

"And what about now - you're still a wolf?" the priest asks.

"You can't turn someone from a sheep into a wolf and then back again, so where does that leave me now?"

Where, indeed, are we leaving our vets?