"Theatre of War," An Ex-Marine Brings Iraq Stateside to Washington area

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/07/AR2005080700883.html

Theater of War

An Ex-Marine Brings Iraq Stateside at MetroStage

By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, August 8, 2005; C01

It's been a very bad week for the Marines in Iraq, and playwright Sean Huze is taking it personally. "Twenty-one Marines killed in the past 48 hours," he says, his voice rising in anger. "I wonder when we've had enough -- when we as a society will hold this administration accountable for getting us into a war unnecessarily."

Huze, 30, lean and tattooed, sips from a can of Red Bull and drags on his cigarette outside MetroStage, the small theater in Alexandria where he is overseeing rehearsals for his first play, "The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front." You might be tempted to dismiss him as another antiwar Hollywood liberal -- he is, after all, an actor and playwright from Los Angeles -- except there's this: Until a few months ago, he was Marine Cpl. Huze, a veteran of combat in Iraq. He also was one of those gung-ho young patriots who marched into recruiting offices on Sept. 12, 2001, itching for payback.

Nicknamed "Hollywood" by his fellow Marines, Huze joined the invasion force that toppled Saddam Hussein. More than two years later, buddies in his old unit, the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, are still in Iraq, attempting to disrupt insurgent supply lines in the western Anbar province. When his eyes redden and mist with tears, you get it: This war is still inside him.

"You don't come back the same man," he says, lighting another Natural American Spirit cigarette on an ovenlike evening last week after news broke that 14 Marines had died in a massive roadside bombing in Anbar. "So in essence, no one returns from the war."

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[flpoljunkie]

1. "I wonder when we, as a society, will hold this adminstration accountable

for getting us into a war unnecessarily." Marine Cpl. Huze

This is, indeed, the bottom line.