Greek tragedies, they're all about homecoming from war.
And they're tragedies because there are no happy homecomings from war.
The American narrative of war is that it's a just war,
it's a righteous war, and everybody goes home and lives happily ever after,
and that's not the truth. The truth is something else;
it's something much darker,
and you have to deal with that in order to get on with the rest of your life.
I enlisted in the Marine Corps two weeks after my seventeenth birthday.
I was actually stationed in New York City on 9/11,
and that changed everything.
I got deployed to Iraq in 2004,
and I was the first U.S. military advisor
to train and lead in combat an Iraqi army battalion.
I tried to meet them where they were, in their own cultural terms.
I built very profound friendships with the Iraqis,
and I'm very, very aware
that the relationships I built saved my life.
I was wounded in the second battle of Fallujah.
A rocket-propelled grenade impacted a rock wall right behind my right shoulder.
I elected to stay in the battle.
I couldn't do anything with my right arm, because my shoulder was broken.
I had traumatic brain injury, and I bled for a long time.
I bled for a couple of weeks. When I came back to New York City,
sometimes I couldn't tell if I was in Iraq or in the United States.
That's post-traumatic stress. I was really messed up.
I was really lost. And I needed a lot of help.
When I was in college, one of my majors was classical civilization,
so I started to go back to the Greek tragedies.
There's a tragedy called Ajax. The great warrior comes home,
and he kills 600 oxen because he thinks that they're Trojans.
And when I read that I said,
"Oh, now this is what I'm experiencing."
You interpret all your inputs as threats,
and so you respond neurologically like you're in combat,
because that's what keeps you alive. I started coming to The Met,
to the classical section, and it started rebuilding me spiritually.
This is a truth about the human experience of war and war trauma.
I could come here and see, mirrored in the broken statues,
my own body.
It's almost like I'm experiencing catharsis.
The sculptures are beautiful, but they're still broken,
and that was a really important thing for me to come to understand,
especially as it became apparent that physically I couldn't do things
that I had once done.
So you have to come to, sort of, accept
that about yourself and your body and what your limitations are.
I have a young son. He is eight.
I've taken him to the Museum and it's opening up a world for him.
He's aware that people lived 2000 years ago,
that they had lives and that they had hopes and dreams. So it's creating,
I think, an empathy beyond his years.
I believe in what the Greeks would have recognized as "singing the war."
This generation of wars has not been sung.
In order for not just individual veterans to heal,
but our nation to heal, from the trauma of war, I think that,
not just my story,
but all these other stories of men and women who have served in Iraq,
of their spouses who got left behind,
create this whole epic story.