Gregory Burke's "Black Watch' in Brooklyn

"And for what?"

In Black Watch, a play about young soldiers coming to terms with themselves, the character Cammy throws that question to his commanding officer. He's not being arrogant. He follows protocol ("May I speak frankly, sir?"), and permission is granted.

Their unit is Scotland's Black Watch, a regiment with a 300-year history and the pride to match. It has fought all over the world, won respect everywhere and continues to attract new recruits who yearn to live up to the tradition. They chose this life, one of them insists to a documentary filmmaker who comes to interview them after they've returned to Scotland. It's not as if they didn't have other options, the soldier adds.

But in fact, they didn't. They're poorly educated, from small communities in the Scottish heartland, with few job prospects, and too young to be cynical of the world, its promises and their own limitations, and so they join up alongside their lifelong buddies. They were easy pickings for the insatiable maw of war.

The enemy is monotony

Cammy's question concerns the unit's deployment in Iraq, but it's late in the game. He and his mates haven't engaged in much fighting, and boredom has worn them down.

From a distance, they watch American planes destroy Iraqi bridges and buildings, and while they admire the tremendous firepower, they can only observe. So they give the finger to the planes delivering the explosives.

Tedium also drives them deeper into their own adolescent behaviors. The character Fraz walks around with his trousers dropped and hanging around his ankles. The sergeant tells him to put them on.

"Technically, they're on," Fraz begins to explain, "but—" and the rest of his logical clarification is drowned out by the screaming of the sergeant to follow orders.

Most of all, the men are demoralized because they haven't been trained to confront the enemy they actually face in Iraq. Boot camp didn't include dealing with roadside bombs or suicide bombers.

Politicians' puppets

Where, these Black Watch warriors seem to ask, is the honor that their gloried predecessors found in battle? Soon enough, they realize that they were lied to from the moment they signed up: They won't be home for Christmas. When they are shipped home eventually, some will be mentally maimed for life, and others will be dead.

When an improvised explosive device strapped on a child blows up three of the Black Watch, they're literally blown up— eight to ten feet in the air, visibly suspended by wires and slowly lowered to the ground.

As they dangle, they resemble puppets, a possible reference to all the foreign policies that have always brought young men to battlefields and left them scarred, if not worse off.

Front-row seat

This production is excellently acted— the ten actors are so muscular, agile, foul-mouthed and goonish in their shaved heads and protruding ears that I had to remember that they were actors, not soldiers. The theater is laid out like a basketball court, with no seat farther than five rows back, so every member of the audience is constantly reminded how young they are; they hardly look like they have to shave.

Despite the physical closeness, we don't get close to them as individuals (at the end, we can name only one or two, and the sergeant is known only by his rank). Yet we appreciate how, in the course of the play, these soldiers are collectively stripped of every ideal they might have had, and— perhaps worse— are abandoned by everyone except each other.

I fell for it, too

Black Watch got me thinking about my experience in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, and my own near miss. I enjoyed many career options, but in those days— just before the dawn of the "'60s cultural revolution— nearly everyone completed some form of military service. So in college, I joined the Platoon Leaders' Class, expecting to spend two years of active duty as a lieutenant and four years in the reserves.

After my first summer training period, I ranked about 790th in a group of some 800— pretty bad, it would seem. But another 700 had dropped out by then, so actually I finished in the middle of my entering class.

I concluded that I had reached my potential, so before my second summer of training to earn a commission, I re-read my contract and found that I could decline the orders without prejudice and simply take my place among the enlisted reserves.

At that point the military became fun. Each month I found myself repairing lenses for telescopic sights (which could have been a useful career, if not the start of an interesting hobby). Later I drove an armored amphibious vehicle.

My near miss occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In those days, the Marines had only two amphibious tank units, and our company was one of them. We would have been the cannon fodder, like the soldiers in the Black Watch. As everyone knows now, after a series of policy missteps by government leaders of at least two nations, luck was on peace's side—and mine.

Lost discharge papers

During Black Watch, the character Stewarty mentally snaps and violently threatens the filmmaker. Stewart had been diagnosed with depression and should have been mustered out of the unit long before, but his "papers got lost," Cammy explains.

I was struck that, in this technological age, papers still get lost— because that's what happened in my day when the supply of new recruits slowed down. In my unit, the sergeant in charge of discharging Marines whose enlistments were completed kept the company at full strength by "losing" the papers of those eligible for discharge.

Some of my fellow Marines ended up staying a year or so longer than they had to; sometimes, yielding to promises of promotion, they rashly re-enlisted, waking up later to object, as if they'd re-upped under compulsion or in a drunken stupor.

I couldn't imagine myself so valuable to the Marines, but I took no chances. I made sure that the discharge sergeant knew me well, as a friend— for then, I reasoned, he wouldn't screw me when my time was up.

The sergeant liked chess, so I engaged him in games during my monthly weekends on the base. During our two-week summer activation, we played some two dozen times.

Need I tell you that he won the great majority of our matches? Need I add that I enjoyed the symbolism of using a game with martial roots to close out my military career?