[Vision2020] Ex-Soldier Playwright Spotlights Abu Ghraib

[Tom Hansen]

>From the Army Times at www.ArmyTimes.com -

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Ex-soldier playwright spotlights Abu Ghraib

By Todd Dvorak - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Feb 16, 2007 8:45:27 EST
   
IOWA CITY, Iowa - Joshua Casteel spent eight months at Iraq's infamous Abu
Ghraib prison, interrogating teenage boys, grandfathers, taxi drivers,
religious leaders and an occasional self-professed jihadist.

Since leaving Iraq, then later the Army in May 2005, Casteel has struggled
to make sense of his experience, coming to terms with what he considers
questionable techniques used by fellow interrogators. From his effort to
deal with post-traumatic stress and ensuing spasms of guilt has come a play
that opens this weekend at the University of Iowa.

"Returns" is Casteel's first play, an autobiographical journey with a
smattering of anti-war sentiment.

"It's more personal than political," said Casteel, a 27-year-old student in
the playwright division of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
"I wanted to tell the stories of the people I interrogated - the story of
... those who committed torture and what happened to them and their search
for forgiveness."

The play begins when Casteel arrives in Iraq, eight months after photographs
surfaced showing the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The scandal
has led to the convictions of 11 enlisted soldiers for cruelty and
mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

>From there, the play unfolds in vignettes that skip across time and
continents. Some are set in the prison with Casteel, playing the lead role
of James, questioning Ahmed, a prisoner dressed in an orange jumpsuit who is
accused of attending terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

Others are set after James and his small circle of military friends have
returned home. At times, the cast fondly recalls the laughs and light
moments shared in war. Other scenes are more troubling, such as the
recurring theme of Mark, a fictional interrogator who engaged in torture and
seeks forgiveness from James, who is reluctant to give it.

Casteel said his own battles with post-traumatic stress and his struggles to
savor the quiet moments in his postwar life account for the play's form.

"The hardest thing for me when I got back was just being still," Casteel
said. "It was hard for me to write for long periods of time and focus, which
is why I wrote this in vignettes and short periods of action."

A native of Cedar Rapids, Casteel grew up an evangelical Christian, spent
summers at Christian Bible camps and was president of his high school's
Young Republicans club. As a junior in high school, he enlisted in the Army
Reserve and after graduation enrolled in the U.S. Military Academy, quitting
after five months at West Point.

"I felt too claustrophobic and stifled there, too different," he said.

But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Casteel re-enlisted, opting
for the Army's intensive Arabic language and interrogation training. He
deployed to Baghdad in 2004, postponing an invitation to enroll in the
seminary.

At the time of his arrival, the prison was already operating under reforms
prompted by the scandal. Yet Casteel said friends assigned to special forces
and mobile interrogation units, operating outside the prison, used tools
that conflicted with international law. In the play, Casteel incorporates
techniques to induce hypothermia as well as loud music, bright lights,
kicking and punching.

After eight months in Abu Ghraib and a series of interrogations with a
22-year-old jihadist prisoner, Casteel had had enough.

"We began to discuss war and violence," Casteel said. "I asked him why he
came to kill, and he asked me why I did? At that point, I knew I could go no
further, unless I wanted to get into a debate about which one of us had the
more just cause."

Casteel filed for conscientious objector status in February 2005 and
received an honorable discharge three months later.

Since then, he has given talks about the war. Last year, he performed part
of "Returns" at a fundraiser for Human Rights Watch in Great Britain at the
invitation of David Gothard, associated director of the Abbey Theatre,
Ireland's national theater. Gothard, a guest professor at the University of
Iowa this semester, is the director of "Returns."

"I think this is going to be a major play," Gothard said. "I think it's a
brilliant example of someone who realizes halfway through what he's doing in
war, stops everything and begins writing on the raw edge of the situation
we're in."

The play is also scheduled to be performed Monday at Columbia College in
Chicago.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

 "It's hard for me, living in this beautiful White House, to give you a
firsthand assessment. I haven't been there. You have. I haven't."

-- George W. Bush, when asked by ABC reporter Martha Raddatz if there is a
civil war in Iraq