“Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” It is a quote often (and likely mistakenly) attributed to the 20th century French philosopher and writer Albert Camus; but it also perfectly captures the spirit of what he and his existentialist contemporaries sought to do in their plays known as Theatre of the Absurd: to shock its audience out of complacency and bring it face to face with the harsh realities of the human condition. For instance, that the world isn’t always fair or rational; that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people; that good and bad people do both good and bad; that while fate is out of our control, the future is our responsibility; that ultimately, our life is up to us—despite, at times, it seemingly being meaningless and absurd.

While the masses may need this kind of soul-stirring shock, veterans need hardly; “Deployment is the definition of absurdity,” as one Green Barret and former client once told me. War is a dizzying world of contradictions lived in the extremes far removed from “normal” life: thrilling highs and tedious and sometimes agonizing lows; the honor of service, pride of purpose; the charge of danger; the rush of crude power; inflicting intentional violence for the greater good; tugs of war between loyalty and betrayal; the immediacy of life and the ubiquity of death; an all-consuming devotion to an intimate brother- and sisterhood. As David Wood wrote in his book What Have We Done,

“War is an alternate moral universe where many of the rules and values we grew up with are revoked. Do unto others, suspended. An alien world in which complex moral puzzles, like confronting a child combatant, demand instant decisions by those who are least fit to make them, for reasons of incomplete neurological development and life experience. An environment for which the United States has trained its warriors exhaustively in physical fitness and military tactics but left them psychologically and spiritually unprepared. An environment from which they return to find their new understanding of the world and who they have become fits awkwardly or not at all into their old lives in peacetime America. They return to a civilian public whose sporadic attention to veterans largely fails to comprehend or acknowledge the experiences they have absorbed on our behalf.”

The problem with absurdity, as Joe Kincheloe points out in Fiction Formulas, “is that it dances with fate around the........

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