Having just finished another run of An Iliad, I’ve given a lot of thought to its message. In the retelling of the Trojan war, the play centers on the themes of rage, loss and grief. (I know, some of you are foggy on the story – that’s okay – just keep reading!) Rage drives Achilles, first to stop fighting because he feels he’s been belittled, and then to mercilessly kill Hector for killing Patroclus. While we want to deny that we would never do anything horrible ourselves, one of the points of the play is that in the wrong place at the wrong time, we’re all capable of doing something terrible. It’s an uncomfortable truth – but in recognizing it, we gain compassion for all humans. Saying “I’m not like them”, gives us permission to deny someone’s humanity. When we know we’re all in the same boat, we look at things differently.

Achilles, Hector, Patroclus – all the “heroes” in the war – are deeply wounded and flawed, and if they were around today, we’d identify their actions as coming from post-trauma stress disorder.

I did talkbacks after every performance of the piece. Some of the most moving responses came from military veterans who attended the show. They, as a group, connected with the characters in the piece in ways I could only guess at. Fighting for a lost cause or in a meaningless war, leaving family behind, losing comrades, experiencing rage and blood lust, and carrying all that with them for the rest of their lives were all things the veterans spoke of in the talkback. One spoke about how he brought back a rage that he had to manage every day. We all have some trigger for rage (and men, I think, particularly with our extra dose of testosterone), but veterans carry a particular burden. A burden placed on them by the orders they’ve been given.

Our culture doesn’t know what to do with these folks. Saying “Thank you for your service” while cutting veterans benefits seems particularly hollow. It’s lip service. What we don’t want to do is hear their stories. They’re too hard to hear. If you want to think more about this, I highly recommend Sebastian Junger’s little gem of a book, Tribe.

And then there’s the grief and sorrow of those who have lost ones they love – Achilles’ loss of Patroclus, and Hector’s wife Andromache and mother Hecuba wailing in grief over his death. It happened in ancient Troy, and it’s happening here, too. It’s all hard to take. But as Elizabeth Ellis, a great storyteller said, “If they went through it, we can at least look and listen.”

Which brings me to the events of the past several weeks. When I read about the Afghan immigrant and the shooting of National Guard soldiers stationed (for show) in DC, I see the war come home.

There’s probably not much sympathy for Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot the Guard service people, but when you read about him, you find a person who committed atrocities in our name and was traumatized by a war, endangered in his own country for actions he committed, then finding himself lost in a foreign country, ready for something to trigger his PTSD. Other soldiers have done the same thing here after they returned, but they were Americans. To blame it on a nationality, deporting all Afghans, is the height of hypocrisy. As V.S. Naipaul said, they are here because we were there. You might as well deport anyone who fought in our wars overseas regardless of nationality, because there are thousands of them out there lost, wounded, and ready to be triggered.

I wish the Iliad weren’t so timeless, but it is. Every performance of An Iliad brought that home to me. It would be good to have leaders who understand the cost of this violence, not ones who give orders to bomb a boat twice to make sure everyone is dead. I’m thinking of the drone operator who got the order to finish off the job. It’s a terrible burden to carry, and the cost of it, what they’ve done in our name, is passed on to all of us.