By Jack Saul, Photo: from article, Psychotherapy Networker, September/October 2023
As you enter the dimly lit space, you sit down in one of 10 chairs arranged in a circle. Others file in and choose their seats, each person facing several others. You wait. Then, you begin to hear the voices of other men and women, invisible to you, speaking from all sides of the space. The voices rise above the ambient sounds and music in the background. First, you hear a young man. His voice is prerecorded, disembodied, but still urgent and compelling. He’s telling you and the others about how he’d witnessed the towers burn in New York City on 9/11, and how he’d pledged not to let anyone do that to our country, ever again. After he’d enlisted, he was deployed to Afghanistan, but there, things didn’t unfold as he’d anticipated. The surprise raids he’d made on peoples’ homes weighed heavily on him. He can’t get it out of his head: what if an occupying army was busting into houses in his home state of New Jersey? The homes and families he’d raided had seemed eerily like his own.
Describing one such raid, he says, “I saw how frightened the kids were as we searched the house and then arrested their father because we’d found a gun. As we took him away in handcuffs, I knew he’d probably be sent to Abu Ghraib.” His voice caught. “Where he’d be interrogated and tortured.”
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