High impact theater swept into the Washington, DC, area last night: “The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front.”
The play places front-and-center those who are part of the collateral damage: soldiers struggling to make sense of it all.
Through a series of gripping monologues by U.S. Marines fighting in Iraq during the opening days of the invasion, it is made painfully clear that the kids in uniform see more than the regurgitated wire copy narrating the all too timid television coverage that brings the war into American homes.
Soldiers are the ones who unleash the storm of bullets, wade among the body parts after a firefight, pull an injured father from a bombed Toyota after his wife and children have been burned beyond recognition. The soldiers may do everything possible to make sure the father lives even as they recognize that saving his life may be worse than his dying: the father will always remember losing his family in the carnage.
This is the stuff of fiction, but playwright Sean Huze witnessed the war firsthand as a combat Marine who enlisted the day after 9-11. He wanted to stand for those who had fallen on that sorry day and he believed President Bush’s stated reasons for invading Iraq were just.
Instead he witnessed innocent civilians mowed down in firefights; children killed; and frenzied soldiers struggling to maintain psychological balance in the slaughter and wrestled to make sense of what they were doing.

“I saw more than a few dead children littering the streets in Nasiriyah, along with countless other civilians. And through all this, I held on to the belief that it had to be for some greater good,” Huze wrote in a letter widely circulated on the Internet to filmmaker Michael Moore that praises Fahrenheit 9/11.

Then came the rising certainty that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction or links to al Qaeda — an uneasy signal that their commander-in-chief President Bush, who declared on May 1, 2003, that “major combat operations” were over, was dead wrong.

“Months have passed since I’ve been back home and the unfortunate conclusion I’ve come to is that Bush is a lying, manipulative [expletive] who cares nothing for the lives of those of us who serve in uniform,” he continued in his letter to Moore. “Hell, other than playing dress-up on aircraft carriers, what would he know about serving this nation in uniform?”

As insurgency attacks gathered increasing momentum by July of that year, President Bush then uttered another now regrettable insight: “Bring ’em on.”
To Huze, it was an unforgivable, he recently told The Washington Post:

“It was a provocation that no one who had experience in combat ever would have issued,” he says. “Who bleeds in order for him to look tough?”

The Post continues:

….On patrol near Baghdad and Tikrit, he also saw for himself how little was being done to secure the peace: Looters ran wild after Hussein’s rapid fall. No way were there enough Marines, he realized, to stop the constant theft of AK-47s and artillery rounds from Iraqi Army resupply points. (“The administration went to war on the cheap,” he says now. “The troops did the best we could with what we had.”)

The play is presented by Charlie Fink, a former AOL and Disney executive who also put his fingerprints on “The Lion King” at its fruition.