Wounded Warriors Take Center Stage

Jesuit-run program urges injured veterans to tell their stories

By Jim Duffy
Photography by Aric Mayer

They know the sights the sounds the taste of war. They know bombs, shrapnel, firefights. They know killing, and the fear of being killed. Now the mission is different. Civilians again, they need to come to grips with their experiences, their wounds and their disabilities. Jesuit Brother Rick Curry, himself disabled, felt called to help veterans learn to tell their stories and experience the power of the arts. That’s why he started the Wounded Warriors Writing Program, a 10-day theatrical writing workshop for veterans, many just back from Iraq or Afghanistan. Ignatian Imprints sent writer Jim Duffy to Belfast, Maine — the frontlines of Curry’s groundbreaking program — to watch these men and women go about the work of crafting their courageous tales.

     All over the country summer theater workshops culminate in the same anxious moment. It arrives tonight at 7:32 p.m., when Brother Rick Curry, SJ, emerges from the wings to stand in front of a red curtain draped across the stage. In the spotlight, his face looks even ruddier than usual.
     Just this once, it might be nice if the occasion allowed for a long-winded welcome. Then Curry, a Maryland Province Jesuit, could tell the audience about his life’s work and about the day when that work turned on a dime.

     NTWH is based in New York City, but it decamps every summer to Belfast, Maine. That’s where I spent 10 days in July observing the first in a planned series of workshops geared to helping wounded and disabled veterans develop the skills to tell their stories. The nine vets who’ve signed on will work with writing teachers to craft monologues about their experiences. Then they’ll collaborate with students in a concurrent acting program to put on a show featuring those monologues.
This, then, is the mix-and-match crowd that assembles that first Saturday evening in a rehearsal studio in the old high school that houses the NTWH-Crosby Center. Students arrived two days ago. They’ve settled into dorm-style rooms, and they’ve attended their first classes.
     Now it’s time for formal introductions. One by one, they take the stage. Some head up a ramp in wheelchairs. Others take steps with walkers, canes or prosthetic legs. Several show no visible disabilities. They’re either wounded vets on the road back to physical recovery, or personal care attendants to disabled students — PCAs, too, enroll in the workshop.
     Dexter Pitts has an astonishing set of shoulders, so broad it seems he might scoop the whole room up into his arms. He’s from Kentucky and served in Iraq with the Army. “You should never say never,” he says, “because that’s what I said when I first heard about this thing.”
Buddy Hayes is one of four female Army vets here. “Believe it or not,” she says, “this skinny little body has finished two marathons in this wheelchair!” She’d like to try her hand at standup comedy someday, even if she can’t stand up.
     Michael Jernigan’s raw voice fits the stereotype of his Marine Corps background. “Back home, I get a lot of hero worship — ’thanks for your service,’ all that,” he says. “What made me want to come here is this program can give us tools to vent our frustrations. I’ve got a lot of frustrations.”
     When Todd Fringer finds the button on his wheelchair and lets loose with two sharp horn toots of greeting, the grin he shows off is sly and conspiratorial. The Army vet hopes to write an inspiring book, but something else brought him to Belfast, too. “When I heard about this, it just felt like there’s a reason I’m supposed to be here,” he says.

     Sunday morning, I take a seat at a table on an outdoor patio and exchange introductions with three vets — Pitts, Fringer, and Justin Bajema. The small talk that unfolds while we scarf up eggs and bacon follows a distinctly male trajectory.
     First topic: Girls, in particular the ones out on the dance floor last night at a local watering hole. Second topic: Cars, and how to fix them. Third topic: Cursing — even the vets are amazed by how much profanity they use.
Fourth topic: War. Pitts saw his share of eager newcomers in Iraq, guys who’d race full of bravado into their first bit of action. He puts on a mock-macho voice: “I’m goin’ to get a medal!”
     Bajema snorts derisively. “I hate guys like that,” he says.
     The newcomers learn soon enough. Sometimes, Pitts says, it’s a matter of minutes after they go charging off that they’re heading back the other way, faces ashen with fear. “It’s the kind of thing that makes atheists go, ‘OH MY GOD!’” he explains.
     If there wasn’t a reporter at the table, Bajema might have left what comes next unsaid — it’s not news to anyone else here. “People understand how a bomb can blow off someone’s legs and how a gunshot can make them blind,” he says. “But what they don’t understand is how everybody who comes back is wounded.”
     Fifth topic: Musical theater. Yes, musical theater. Pitts announces that Curry has offered him a star turn singing on stage to an old Cole Porter tune. “Dudes, I am not responsible for broken eardrums,” he says. The table erupts in laughter.
     The workshop has too many Michaels, so they’ve all been re-christened: Daredevil Mike, Ironworker Mike, Guido, and Marine Michael. Dinnertime finds me sitting opposite the last of these, Michael Jernigan, and straight away he launches into the tale of the time a nurse at Walter Reed Army Medical Center tried to give him an IV, only to have him lunge out, grab at the needle, and try to stab her.
     He pauses, the smile on his lips almost playful. “But in my own defense,” he continues, “I could say that at that time and in my mind I was still in Iraq.”
     Tall and lanky, Jernigan seems on first glance to be military to the core, but he’s also a man of many avid enthusiasms. He can gab forever about cigars, soul food, pop music, and films. The first movie he went to after losing his eyesight was a biography of Ray Charles.
     It was a roadside bomb that tore Jernigan up. Thirty surgeries later, he made it back home to Florida. That’s when he and his wife split. He had the diamonds from her ring embedded in a fake eyeball. There’s function to this as well as showmanship. Fake eyes look too realistic; sometimes strangers can’t tell whether Jernigan’s blind. No one mistakes his glittering eye for the real thing.
     As dinner winds down, Wendy Clouser stops by. The first night at the Crosby Center, the Army veteran noticed that a flag was hanging outside all night in the dark. She’s got a signup sheet in hand now, and she’s rounding up volunteers for a proper flag-duty rotation.
     At dusk I head out to watch the ceremony. Buddy Hayes runs the ropes, bringing the banner down slow and easy. Clouser and Carol Schultz gather it up with care and delicacy, then pull it taut. They fold it in half once, and again. Then they start in with triangle folds.
     “If you’ve ever done that, even just once, you’ll never forget,” Hayes says on the way back inside, the flag in her lap. “You can’t forget something like that!”

     At Monday morning’s rehearsal, it’s “Anything Goes.” This is the Cole Porter tune NTWH Dean John Spalla has picked for an opening musical number. Raucous and funny, it might seem an unlikely note to strike when introducing the Wounded Warriors and their disabled colleagues.
     But that’s the point. Come show time, the audience, too, might be nervous. Maybe they’ve never seen disabled actors. Maybe they have somber expectations of the veterans. What this song tells them is, “Relax. It’s okay to laugh.”
     Spalla runs a brisk, efficient session. Breathing exercises, posture check, group humming — all done in a flash and then Spalla’s at the piano and the cast is singing away, and reasonably well, too.
I’m sitting down in the audience with several faculty members. Most teachers here are working actors and writers in their 20s and 30s; the writing teachers have asked me to steer clear of their classrooms during the workshop, so I take this opportunity to see how things are going.
     Playwright Sibyl O’Malley says she’s amazed at how quickly her students have developed a sense of shared purpose. “They’re so game,” she says. “I’ve never had a class where students are always on time and ready to work. I love the military — so darn punctual.”
     Novelist Michael Conforti (a.k.a. “Guido”) has the other writing class. Sensing how little experience his students have, he invited them to complain if he set the bar too high. Linda Ysewyn, an Army vet, spoke right up at that: “You set that bar as high as you like, and we’ll find a way to crawl over it.”
     Movement teacher Kathleen McElfresh heads onstage to arrange choreography. She breaks students into three groups according to height. Then she demonstrates a few of the dance steps and gestures she wants.
     “It should be like you’re shooting energy out of your fingertips,” she says. “Think ‘Chicago.’ Think sexy!”
     At the end of a run-through, she asks everyone to hold places. Hands on hips, she surveys the stage to make sure everything looks just so. There’s one problem, and it’s a big one.
     “Dexter!” she cries. “We have to do something about those shoulders!”

     Tuesday morning, there’s a sense of urgency in the air at the Crosby Center. The writers are deep into the work now, so it’s generous of veterans Clouser, Schultz, and Hayes to take a few minutes to chat. I start by asking Hayes what brought her here, but she doesn’t really answer.
     Instead, she tells me how when it came time to board a plane bound for Maine, she nearly turned tail. This is not characteristic. Back in the 1970s, Hayes signed on as the lone woman in a class of 600 soldiers learning to operate heavy construction equipment. And the multiple sclerosis that has her in a wheelchair now hasn’t kept her out of those marathons.
     Clouser and Schultz harbored doubts, too. It’s partly a fear of the unknown, but it goes deeper. In the military, communication is about precision and facts, no emotions allowed. That approach can become a habit that sticks with a person after the uniform comes off, just like being on time and keeping good order.
     “You want to tell who’s military here?” Hayes says. “Walk down the hall and look in the bedrooms. If there’s a mess, they’re not military.”
     Clouser and Schultz are as reserved as Hayes is boisterous. They both served in Desert Storm during the first Iraq war, and they both suffer from neurological complications that seem a piece with the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome. Schultz uses a walker. Clouser wears a knee brace.
     “The stresses we’re trying to share are buried deep,” Clouser says. “Maybe we’ve been able to share bits and pieces of them with our families and other vets. But this is different. It’s putting it out there — in public. Coming here is a big risk.”

     There’s a paradox at the heart of NTWH’s mission: Disability is everything, and yet disability is nothing.
     That first part is clear enough. It’s right there in the name. When Curry founded NTWH, he was aiming to create a place where disabled talent could develop and then go out to compete and prove the doubters wrong.

     But he also made a place where students discover a sense of community. The word disability encompasses a broad array of conditions, causes, and challenges. Does someone born blind really have much in common with someone who loses a leg at midlife? Many disabled people spend the bulk of their days living among able-bodied families and coworkers; they never really get a chance to grapple with such questions.
     “Out in the world, it’s easy to think that no one else knows what you’re going through,” Curry says. “Here, they have to say, ‘Oops, I belong.’”

     But disability turns into nothing at NTWH when it comes to the work. At a faculty orientation meeting in advance of this workshop, the teachers discussed the importance of demanding from these students the same commitment and excellence they would demand in any other setting.
     “These people are always treated as disabled out there,” Curry says. “Here, they get to be artists, and they get to be treated as such.”

Jim Figueroa and Marine Michael made the transition from roommates to friends almost immediately. The two seem always together now en route to classes and rehearsals, Jernigan keeping a hand on his buddy’s shoulder to find the way.
     On the surface, the two are a study in contrasts. Figueroa is a soft-spoken man with a gentle smile and a caring manner. A National Guardsman with 23 years in, he served as a medic in Afghanistan with a unit that saw the worst of the worst. But like Jernigan, Figueroa has endured his share of troubles since he returned home with a bum shoulder.
     “I expected everything to be the same as it was when I left,” he says. Instead, his wife had moved on with her life. A daughter had run away from home. Even small stuff went sour. Figueroa winces at the memory of going to a restaurant where a worker was blowing up balloons for a party. A few popped by accident. Figueroa had to flee.
     “Since we got here, all us vets have been talking so much about all this stuff,” he says. “It’s like we know our experiences are unique to ourselves, but maybe what we’re learning is that they’re not unique to the world. Does that make sense?”

     I’m in the Lookout Pub Tuesday night when some vets come in. Fringer offers to buy me a beer. Now retired from the Army, he served in the first Iraq war. One of the other vets has dubbed Fringer “our bugler,” because he’s always honking that wheelchair horn of his at the funniest possible moments.

     The truth is, Fringer does carry himself like a leader. His voice doesn’t get much above a raspy whisper these days, so he motions me to lean down so he can ask a question: “Do you know what happened to me?”
     Then he tells the story of how the drunk driver hit his car and how he scrambled like mad to make sure his passengers were safe and how just when everything seemed like it might be all right, that drunk hit the gas and took off, dragging Fringer down the road. At the hospital, nobody had much hope he’d come out of the coma. Doctors predicted he’d never be able to use his legs again.
     When improvisation teacher Topping Haggerty pops in carrying a laptop, Bajema borrows it and heads online via the bar’s wireless connection. Seconds later, he’s showing off photos of the wounds the roadside bomb inflicted.
     It’s hard to square what’s in those pictures with the sight of the absurdly handsome young Marine at the keyboard. The hunk of shrapnel that nearly tore off Bajema’s leg weighed a quarter of a pound. The number doesn’t mean much to me, but it earns impressed whistles from his fellow vets.

     When folks who’ve been through such things set out to write, what is it that they need to say, exactly? The answers emerge Thursday when the vets rehearse their monologues. There’s no real violence in the stories at all. The dominant themes are family, friendship, duty, faith, and love.
     Bajema builds an assemblage out of routine-sounding e-mail messages. The first half are from a healthy him in Iraq to friends and family back home, the rest from him in a hospital bed to buddies still serving over there.
     Fringer writes from inside a brain emerging in cloudy bits and pieces from a coma. What is that overhead? Could it be a person? Only slowly does he gain the clarity to recognize his parents and the girlfriend who will soon become his wife.
     Clouser and Schultz steer away from straight narrative in favor of elliptical prose poems. Clouser’s is haunting, with its recurring evocation of a descending Darkness. Schultz writes with a lighter touch, her words diving underwater to explore a shipwreck with a childlike sense of wonder.

     Jernigan’s monologue is rich in scenery and detail. He recounts the day his father said goodbye to a son headed for Iraq and the way that father later rushed in to help his wounded son. Then things come full circle. The father, a military man, too, is bound for Afghanistan. It’s Jernigan’s turn to say goodbye.
     Figueroa paints a picture of faith in a foreign land, writing about the time he escorted a chaplain into a private home so the minister could conduct services for that rare and brave thing, a family of Afghan Christians.
     Hayes goes the slapstick route. Her poem is titled, “The Toilet Seat Blues.”
     Pitts opens his piece by recounting the aimless, depressed faces he saw all around him at the hospital where he landed after his encounter with a roadside bomb. Then a strange notion takes hold. Pitts rounds up poster board and markers to craft a placard that promises in giant letters, “FREE HUGS TODAY!” And he sets out into the hospital determined to make good on that promise.
     Ysewyn’s monologue is tense and sobering. In it, she’s got a gun trained on a young Iraqi prisoner. The rules of war demand she give this boy blankets and food. She doesn’t have enough blankets and food for her own soldiers. It’s crazy. It’s infuriating. Shooting the boy would make things so much easier. Buoyed by prayer, Ysewyn finds strength in the end to do the right thing.

     There’s still a lot of work left to do before the show. As rehearsals proceed, actors gain more and more control over their lines. The writing in monologues keeps getting tighter and sharper. All in all, the journey to show time seems a pretty joyous affair now. Friday night at a downtown bar called Club 132, the NTWH crowd turns out in force for a karaoke extravaganza that runs to closing time.

     Saturday night, the audience that makes it out despite the rain is small, maybe 100 in all. But when the show ends, they give the Wounded Warriors and their acting colleagues an enthusiastic ovation.
     The moments that make the show memorable for me are a mixed bag. Some are part of the dramatic arc of the production. Others are just striking details. When Pitts gets his turn as a song-and-dance man in a quartet doing “Primitive Man,” he gets a big laugh by scrunching his shoulders up like one of the pro wrestlers he so loves to watch.
     Some veterans read their own monologues. Others stand beside actors who do the reading. Figueroa’s piece is read by Avery Olmstead, who’s had trouble getting the delivery down pat. But Olmstead pulls it off beautifully this time. When he finishes, Figueroa grabs the handles of the actor’s wheelchair to gives an extra oomph into the first push on the way to the back of the stage. The chair just coasts for the second it takes Figueroa to deliver a grateful clap of both hands onto Olmstead’s shoulders.
     The emotional peak of the show goes to the bugler. When the actor Chris Sheridan nears the end of Fringer’s monologue, the writer’s wife, Sarah (who’s here at the workshop as his PCA) appears onstage and raises the footrests on his chair. Then Fringer sets about a task most everyone thought he’d never tackle again. His body shakes some on the way up, but soon enough there he is, standing in the spotlight.
     The closing monologue is Ysewyn’s. Wearing a print skirt and a beige top, the petite woman cuts a demure figure. But she delivers the tale of her tense encounter with that Iraqi prisoner in a voice that’s passionate and strong. When she finishes, her story lingers in the air for a long, quiet moment.
     Then Spalla strikes up on the piano the first notes to “Anything Goes.” It’s time for a closing reprise of the opening number.
     After the applause dies down, Curry steps onstage again and invites everyone to stay for a reception and meet the artists. There, Pitts is doling out free hugs to everyone in sight. He really can scoop a whole roomful of people up into those arms.
     I stay there awhile, congratulating Curry, teachers, and students on a job well done. Then I join the NTWH parade over to Club 132 for more karaoke madness. On the way, I find myself recalling a scene that unfolded at the bar the night before.
     Pitts was singing “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix, and he made a big production out of the lines that go, “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, but you and I we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.”
     Singing those words, he made eye contact with everyone in the room who’s served in Iraq and Afghanistan, even jabbing an index finger towards each of them in turn.
     Figueroa was watching from the back of the room. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter. He flicked it on, lifted it high over his head in tribute, and then broke out laughing.

Read excerpts from several of the Wounded Warrior's monologues.