Youth in War

Dunsinane features a unique producing partnership between Marin Theatre Company and the Conservatory Theatre Ensemble (CTE) at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley. As our CTE student professional actors explore and perform the characters of new recruits to the English army, they follow a long tradition of storytelling and memoirs of youth in war.

War is the world’s second-oldest form of entertainment. From Achilles and Cúchulainn to Krishna and the Volsungs of Icelandic saga, our most enduring stories are about war and war heroes, and the post-Neolithic art found on every continent except Antarctica suggests our fascination with the images of battle as well. Getting caught up in the representation of war allows for the vicarious (and safe) enjoyment of its thrilling and troubling spectacle and the chance to take a peek at life and death in extremis.

– Stacey Peebles, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq (Cornell University Press, 2011)

In a dress, away from base, you’d never guess I was a soldier. Always been a girl that catches a guy’s eyes. And yet I do fifty-five push-ups in under a minute. Tough, and proud to be tough. I love my M-4, the smell of it, of cleaning fluid, of gunpowder: the smell of strength. Gun in your hands, and you’re in a special place. I’ve come to look forward to that.

It can turn you, though.

– Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (W.W. Norton, 2005)

Enchantment refers to the tendency to see in violence some kind of transformative power… [disenchantment] is not a passive recognition of spiritual flatness, but the active stripping away of idealized principles...

– Sarah Cole, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature.” (PMLA 124, no. 5, 2009. As quoted in Stacey Peebles, Cornell University Press, 2011)

I remember most of the names and faces of my platoon mates. I remember the names and faces of some of their girlfriends and wives. I think I know who cheated and who remained faithful. I remember who wrote letters and who drove their men mad with silence. I remember some of the lies and most of the questions. I remember the dreams and the naïve wishes, the pathetic pleas and the trouser-pissing horror.

I remember some of the sand, but there was so much of it, I should be forgiven.

I remember about myself a loneliness and a poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleepless and drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self; lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me. I remember going in one end and coming out the other. I remember being told I must remember and then for many years forgetting.

– Anthony Swofford, Jarhead (Scribner, 2003)

…I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on...through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!

– from “The Infantryman’s Creed,” U.S. Army (from the website of the 199th Infantry Brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia. https://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/)