‘The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front’

Veteran Sean Huze fights disillusionment with a play based on his days in the Iraq war
by David C. Nichols

“My life has not been about being safe,” says actor-turned-Marine-turned-activist Sean Huze. “As long as we on the left are talking about anything other than Iraq, the right is winning.”

He lists issues he sees politicians and the media ignoring: ongoing troop and civilian casualties, uncontrolled civilian contractors, still-insufficient military equipment. “We’re told that all the vehicles going over there are up-armored, and they’re not,” he says. “Body armor is still not getting to all the troops in a combat zone.”

     Huze should know. As an infantryman with the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, he was in the first wave of Operation Iraqi Freedom. What he encountered there is the basis of his play, “The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front,” currently at the Elephant Asylum Theatre.

Huze, 30, couldn’t have foreseen this current mission. Six years ago, he left his native Louisiana to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles. By 2001, he had an agent, a Screen Actors Guild card and an apartment in Hollywood. “I loved my life,” he says with firm conviction. “I felt fulfilled.”

A similar conviction prompted him to enter the Sunset/LaBrea recruiting station on Sept. 12, 2001, and enlist in the Marine Corps. The previous day, Huze had returned to his apartment from an overnight poker game to learn of the terrorist attacks.

“Like probably most Americans,” he recalls, his voice thickening, “I experienced the entire range of emotions: despair, fear, powerlessness, rage.”

A friend’s remark “I don’t see you down at a recruiting office” was catalytic. “My grandfather was a World War II vet in the Pacific, my father served in the Army from 1968 to 1974, and what had I done?” Huze says.

A month later, he left for basic training in San Diego, and by June 2002, Huze received orders to go to Camp Lejeune, N.C. In February of the following year, his unit left for Kuwait. In such Iraqi locales as Nasiriyah, Kut, Baghdad and Tikrit, Huze saw fighting firsthand.

“When you’re in combat,” he says, “all you have time to think about is getting home and making sure that the man to your left, to your right, they get home too. You don’t think about the dead child you see, or the dead man and wonder if he had children of his own.”

While in Nasiriyah, Huze was injured and was sent back to Camp Lejeune. There, he heard President Bush’s now-famous challenge to the Iraqi insurgents: “Bring them on.” “I was outraged,” he says. “It started me thinking critically about the war for the first time.”

He began surfing the Internet, and a new anger built. “Being in Iraq didn’t mean that suddenly I understood policy. But, as I watched the justifications for the invasion dissipate, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda.” Huze interrupts himself. “Well, Iraq’s got ties to Al Qaeda now.”

The rationale for going to war was not, he says, “the rationale that the administration gave to the American people. To realize it wasn’t true left me empty, with nothing but a lot of pain.”

Gradually, Huze began sharing his pain. His acting coach, Marlon Hoffman, encouraged Huze to write down his memories. So did classmate Tom Vick, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War.

“I felt Sean tapped into the truth of war, what that experience is like in the flesh, which film and TV rarely get right,” says Vick, a “Sand Storm” cast member since its inception. “Also, he’s very sensitive. That vulnerability shows in the way he exposes himself through these stories.”

Urged on by Vick and others, Huze wrote what evolved into 10 monologues that became “Sand Storm.” The fact-based material is an amalgam of his and his comrades’ experiences, accompanied by Huze’s digital photographs from the front. The play premiered last fall at Gardner Stages, under Hoffman’s direction.

During that time, Huze was still an enlisted man, undergoing tests to determine whether the injury he sustained in Nasiriyah qualified as a disability. His superiors weren’t happy about “Sand Storm,” but they respected his freedom of speech. “My COs really covered my back,” Huze says. “I love the Marine Corps.” And he means it.

Huze recently joined Operation Truth, a nonpartisan organization founded by Iraq vet Paul Reickoff to bring the troops’ voices and concerns into the national dialogue. Operation Truth is co-producing the Elephant production, directed by David Fofi, a Navy veteran from a family of military veterans. “I know how my brothers talk about war. How my cousin, a Vietnam vet, talks about it, how my dad talks about it,” Fofi says. “They don’t perform their war stories. They tell them. Despite their attempts to be tough, to keep the tears back, those feelings come out in the telling. That’s how Sean has written these stories.”

Huze, who received his honorable discharge in March, expresses gratitude for his wife, Nickie, and 3-year-old son, Andrew, and is resolved to keep telling troops’ stories for “as long as there’s a war in Iraq.” He has also finished his second play, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” a three-act satire that touches on everything from Michael Moore to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. A university tour is under discussion.

So far, none of the politicians Huze has invited including U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Diane Watson has seen it. “Neither side of the aisle is responding,” he says. “Why is that? Listen to us, and fight for us. Because we fight for you.”

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‘The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front’

Where: Elephant Asylum Theatre, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays

Ends: May 14

Price: $20

Contact: (323) 960-4410