Doerries - The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today

Standing before a crowd of war-weary infantry soldiers after a reading of Sophocless Ajax on a U.S. Army installation in southwestern Germany, I posed the following question, one that I have asked tens of thousands of service members and veterans on military bases all over the world: Why do you think Sophocles wrote this play?

Ajax tells the story of a formidable Greek warrior who loses his friend Achilles in the ninth year of the Trojan War, falls into a depression, is passed over for the honor of inheriting Achilless armor, and attempts to kill his commanding officers. Feeling betrayed and overcome with blind rage, Ajax slaughters a herd of cattle, mistaking them for his so-called enemies. When he finally realizes what he has donecovered in blood and consumed with shamehe takes his own life by hurling his body upon a sword.

The play was written nearly twenty-five hundred years ago by a Greek general and was performed in the center of Athens for thousands of citizen-soldiers during a century in which the Athenians saw nearly eighty years of war. And yet the story is as contemporary as this mornings news. According to a 2012 Veterans Affairs study, an average of twenty-two U.S. veterans take their own lives each day. Thats almost one suicide per hour.

A junior enlisted soldier, seated in the third row, raised his hand and matter-of-factly replied, He wrote it to boost morale.

I stepped closer to him and asked, What is morale-boosting about watching a decorated warrior descend into madness and take his own life?

Its the truth, he repliedsubsumed in a sea of green uniformsand were all here watching it together.

The soldier had highlighted something hidden within Ajax: a message for our time. Sophocles didnt whitewash the horrors of war. This wasnt government-sponsored propaganda. Nor was his play an act of protest. It was the unvarnished truth. And by presenting the truth of war to combat veterans, he sought to give voice to their secret struggles and to convey to them that they were not alone.

On March 20, 2003, I lost my twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, Laura Rothenberg, to cystic fibrosis. Twenty months earlier she had received a double lung transplant, and although she survived the procedure, no surgery or drug could ultimately halt the slow, steady decline, as her immune system rejected the new organs. As she approached death, her fear of dying seemed to intensify. Breathing itself became an ordeal, as her inflamed lungs scraped against the inside of her chest with every breath.

On the last day of her life, six weeks after her twenty-second birthday, Laura called her family and closest friends to her bedside, unstrapped her oxygen mask, and proceeded to comfort those of us around her with assuring words. Then, quietly, gracefully, she stopped breathing and died.

Laura was the last of more than twenty of her childhood friends to succumb to cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that afflicts nearly thirty thousand peoplemostly childrenevery year. The friends she had grown up with had become like siblings, over long hospital stays at Columbia-Presbyterian, and all had predeceased her. She often asked me why she alone had survived. My answer was always the same: to tell the story.

Three months after Lauras death, her memoirBreathing for a Livingwas released. The book chronicles her experience undergoing a double lung transplant and the impact of the surgery on those around her. While she was not well enough to write about the final chapter of her life, she was able to dictate an epilogue to me. The last line of the book poses a seemingly unanswerable question: How can I resign myself to death if I am still afraid of not being able to breathe? It was a question that had consumed her for nearly twenty-two years, and which she definitively answered in the final moments of her life.

For weeks after her death, all I wanted to do was talk about it to anyone who would listen. But after her memorial, fewer and fewer people wanted to hear the story. Nevertheless, I kept telling itin all its graphic detaileven as people seemed to recoil from the manic intensity of my monologue. I needed friends and family members, and even strangers, to know that her death was brave and poetic and transcendent and beautiful, and that it was possible for someone to die fully conscious and connected with those she loved.

In the following years, whenever I returned to the ancient Greek tragedies I had studied in college, the conflicted, suffering characters in the plays spoke to me with an immediacy that I never could have anticipated before caring for Laura. I took comfort in knowing that I wasnt the first person who had experienced compassion fatigue, or who had hesitated to act decisively in the presence of extreme suffering, or who felt ambivalent about helping someone to die, or whose grief manifested itself in a withdrawal from the world. If ancient Greek tragedies could speak directly to me, I reasoned, they could also speak to anyone who had lived the human experiences they described. And if theres one thing Ive since learned from listening to audiences all over the world respond to Greek tragedy, its that people who have come into contact with death, who have faced the darkest aspects of our humanity, who have loved and lost, and who know the meaning of sacrifice, seem to have little trouble relating to these ancient plays. These tragedies are their stories.