Tacoma Actors Guild, in association with the Northwest Playwrights Alliance, presented dramatic new play readings on the second Monday of each month during the fall of 2006.

On November 13, at 7:30 p.m. in the TAG auditorium, a new play by David A. Tucker II called Another Day in Baghdad was featured. This was a dramatic reading, with professional actors portraying the characters. There were no costumes and the set only included oriental rugs over portions of an existing set and a partial slide show of Baghdad and Iraq. Some of the actors had been involved in reading and staging the play previously.

Based on experiences and anecdotes compiled from his tour of duty as a Major in the Army Reserve, Tucker has written the play from the point of view of a soldier in the field, at times under fire and sometimes bored while waiting for the next excursion into the city.

The reserve soldiers are friends in civilian life, having spent weekends together at training exercises back home. When they get to Iraq , they are bound by the brother/sisterhood of an Army unit.

They are mostly young and inexperienced in battle, except for the Commander and Top, the 1st sergeant. The only other one older than 30 is Calloway, sometimes annoying and sexist to the females.

On their first excursion from their base into Baghdad , one of the soldiers, Marie Littleton, is killed by an improvised explosive device (IED). The other soldiers, especially Calloway, find it hard to let go of her and make her replacement suffer by calling her Marie and leaving her out of small episodes of friendliness. Until Wodjawoski challenges her unit, she is not fully accepted.

LITTLETON:
"I think at some point you have to give something back. I used to sit in coffee shops, hear people talk about saving the Albanians getting massacred by the Serbs in Kosovo. Or what we should have done in Haiti or better yet Rwanda. But that’s all they did talk, get self-righteous, pound their fist on the table and complain that someone, SOMEONE, should do something. And order another latte in the meantime. “No, no foam please. I hate foam.”

Well, I can’t do that anymore. To say someone, SOMEONE should do something. Because I should be that someone, to look back on my life and say “I stepped forward when the rest stepped back.”

All right, that sounds more heroic than I intended. What I mean is I want to contribute, to be a small part of something bigger, to help improve a part of the world that is beyond myself, to get the hell out of the fucking Starbucks and quit worrying about the late fees on my Hollywood video account. To do something."

The soldiers encounter Iraqi civilians upset by the shortages of electricity and water; interact with Fatima, an Iraqi civilian interpreter who’s threatened by other Iraqis for her “collaboration”; and the children that steal their hearts.

FATIMA:
"Thank you. You are a good man. Maybe you can help me. My son, yesterday they threaten him. At school. The teacher, she is former Ba’athist. Very bad woman. She says she knows that I work for the Americans. She also knows that we are Shia. She says she will tell those loyal to Saddam and they will come and take my child and cut off his hands, then his feet and finally his head if I do not stop working for the Americans. Then they will find my daughter, do the same and worse."

They encounter the same shortages of equipment that we read about in the papers. They bitch and moan when their tour is extended and get ready to go out again. They get bored between missions and fill their days with longings for those at home and camaraderie with their fellow soldiers. It’s a tight knit community and even the annoying Calloway is included.

COMMANDER:
"You specifically told me, sir, as the supply officer, MY supply officer, that you didn’t have any more plates for our body armor. “Suck it up” is the phrase I think you used. Obviously you weren’t going to help me and my guys out. So we helped ourselves.

LTC
Those goddamn plates are not your property, I’m signed for them.

COMMANDER:
If you want me to sign for them, I’d be glad to. I have handreceipts for each and every one from my soldiers.

LTC:
You are going to get them back, Major, and you’re going to do it by tomorrow, understood?!

LTC begins to exit.

COMMANDER:
No, sir.

LTC:
No, sir, what?

COMMANDER:
No, sir, I’m not going to get those plates for you. Tomorrow or otherwise.

LTC:
WHAT?! YOU WILL GET THOSE GODDAMN PLATES OR I’M GOING TO HAVE YOU COURTMARTIALED, IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!! CAN I MAKE THAT ANY MORE CLEAR?!!

COMMANDER:
What’s clear is that you lied to me and you lied to my troops. My troops are getting shot at out there almost every goddamn day while you sit over at Camp Victory, doing your powerpoint presentations . . ."

The play is designed to be acted on a mostly empty stage with photos projected on a background scrim to set the locations and the mood. Tucker has taken photos of the city and citizens during his recent deployment. The photos accompaning this article are all Tucker’s. Staged versions of the play contain many visual, lighting, and audio ques.

PETERS:
"You don’t hear about it much, but for every soldier killed in Iraq, there are nine, ten like me. Guys with this gone, that ruined, bodies torn, shredded, burned, scarred by the reality of a war you never see. For us the war isn’t just another headline in yesterday’s newspaper or a two minute story squeezed between the sports and weather reports. We never really forget. I’d like to forget.

I don’t regret having served my country. But I do regret that wherever my guys go, I’m not going with them. Ever … I’ll never be in the Army again, but I’ll always . . . always be a soldier."

The end of the play came with each of the actors forming a line at the front of the stage. Each one read off the name of a soldier from Washington State that had been killed in Iraq. As video producers we are sometimes asked to produce videos for funerals. And sometimes, we shoot video of the funerals themselves. We did both for one soldier named. Of course the funeral was a military funeral. I felt emotional pain and regret for a life ended early when his name was called.

What continually goes through my mind when thinking about the play Another Day in Baghdad is the song Just Another Day in Paradise. What makes the song and the two titles so ironic and heartbreaking is the fact that the biblical home of Eden (paradise) is supposedly in Iraq. Can we get any further away from paradise than Baghdad? No, probably not. And, yet . . . paradise is just somewhere just down the road.