Sean Huze's "The Sand Storm"

    Sean Huze’s, “The Sandstorm” is a play written about the Iraqi war.  In it, men from the military talk about their time in Iraq.  These stories are very raw and you can easily sense the pain these men have gone through and for many, are still going through.  They speak of the soldiers they lost and the things they did.  One of the men, Sgt Damond, tells of the time he was stationed outside of Al Kut doing traffic control, you know, checking vehicles for weapons and things like that.  He’d been up for at least 30 hours with around 2 hours sleep prior to that. Sgt Damond said the days ran together, the heat didn’t help matters, and he was sick of doing traffic stops.  It had all he could take just when one of his privates was having trouble with some Iraqi men he was trying to search.  While the private was searching one of the men, the private tossed a wad of the mans money to the ground.  The Iraqi man bent to pick it up and pushed the private away when he tried to make the man stand up.  That’s when Sgt Damond kicked the man in his face, knocking him straight to the ground.  And he continued to beat the crap out of the man, he didn’t notice his private was doing the same to another man.  Sgt Damond knew he’d completely lost control of the situation and had just beat a man with no justifiable reason.  Sgt Damond knew it was completely wrong, and yet he felt nothing as he looked down at his victim.
    There are other similar stories and then of one from PFC Weems who’d found a foot after an explosion and tried to find the Iraqi man it had belonged to because it seemed like the right thing to do.
    One of stories I liked most was that of a platoon dispatched to protect a small community from looters.  These Iraqi people in the community were outrageously kind to the soldiers.  They cooked for them out of gratitude, kept water in their refrigerators for the soldiers to have cold water, and refused any money from the soldiers when they tried to give it.  These people were grateful to the soldiers, even in the wake of watching us blow up parts of their town.  They understood why it was done, held no grudges, and even seemed to agree with it.  Like they didn’t like the way their country was run, or ruled rather, either.  The people in this town put the humanity back in these soldiers who had come to feel little to nothing in the wake of death and destruction.
    At one point in the play, one of the soldiers says that when they come home there’s an unspoken code that you don’t talk about the things that happened when you were at war.  I see the truth in this.  Any soldier I’ve ever met, never talks about what happened over there or the things he/she did.  I think there should be more plays like Sean Huze’s.   Perhaps people in America should  know what the men and women who defend this country must endure so that things like 9/11 don’t happen again.  Perhaps then, just maybe, that mosque in New York, at the sight of the world trade center, wouldn’t have even the slightest chance of being built.  Maybe then people could see it as a complete travesty.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKFtNEM23d8