Marine veteran helps TV show understand war
LaPorta finds solace advising ‘This Is Us’ about depicting military authentically
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — We’re hurtling down empty Santa Monica side streets before dawn. Riding shotgun is an exercise in grip strength. Knuckles white, wheels screaming, heart pounding, music blaring.
For Milo Ventimiglia, the man who has been held up as America’s dad for the past six years on NBC’s “This Is Us,” this is simply controlled chaos. For me, a U.S. Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan, the entire experience — the early morning car ride, the story you’re reading and how I came to work on his television show — is equal parts surreal and ridiculous.
It is also my own melancholic — and, ultimately, therapeutic — reflection of my war experiences and life afterward.
We jump on I-10. I think back to four years ago. I had set up an interview with Dan Fogelman, the creator of “This Is Us,” and American novelist Tim O’Brien, author of “The Things They Carried,” and had been hired to help craft the Vietnam War storyline in the show’s third season.
An hour before the call, I found out that a Marine I had served with in Afghanistan had taken his own life nine months earlier. Gunnery Sgt. Vaughn Canlas, 36, was an infantryman with over 16 years of service when he shot himself in the head.
Once I got on the phone, I broke down. All I remember of the interview is a barrage of apologies from me as I struggled to ask my questions through tears. Fogelman said I was being too hard on myself and that I should stop by if I find myself in California.
Three months later, in January 2019, I’m touring the “This Is Us” sets. Fogelman asks: Would I be willing to chat with the writers? The idea was to help craft a new character: Cassidy Sharp, played by Jennifer Morrison. Two hours later, I was offered a job.
The development of Cassidy Sharp in a roomful of strangers was, ultimately, a deep mining of my own internal struggle to understand life after war. Along the way, the show’s writing room turned into my therapy room — which, according to Fogelman, is commonplace.
“That’s our show,” he told me. “I’ve always felt that the show, if you had to pick one thing, was about losing a parent — about grief and about the trauma that comes with that unexpected loss.”
I identified. I told the writers about the curious Afghan boy I watched step on an improvised explosive device. I told them about my survivor’s guilt. About my depression. I told them, too, about how Lance Cpl. Charles “Seth” Sharp (who inspired Cassidy’s last name) bled out in front of his friends. About my loss of innocence and purpose and my crumbling marriage. About the time my ex-wife pulled a
Beretta 9mm out of my mouth.
Fogelman asked me what I hated about Hollywood depictions of service members and veterans.
For me, it was caricatured tropes that painted an individual as either incredibly heroic or incredibly broken. No shades of gray.
That’s not reality. Veterans with post-traumatic stress, I said, still have bills to pay and families to take care of. So we often compartmentalize and pretend we’re OK.
Even when we’re not.
I hear the sound of
Ventimiglia’s clapping hands as he tries to quiet production assistants and cameramen. He’s the director on this episode — number 608, which recently aired. Cassidy Sharp is in the foreground, pretending to be OK in front of her son and her friend Kevin Pearson (played by Justin Hartley), but suffering in silence over how the war in Afghanistan just ended. Her memories fluctuate between her broken marriage and her broken promises.
In the character’s mind — and in mine — is a replay of last August, when thousands of desperate Afghans spilled out onto the tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport, fearful of living under another Taliban regime. The memory of a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport aircraft taking off as several people are crushed under its wheels flashes into my mind’s eye. I think about how I gripped the door handle in Ventimiglia’s car on the ride over to Paramount. I think about the Afghans and their grips, how they clung to the underside of the plane as it gained altitude, how they fell to their death.
On the screen, Dunne, who plays Vietnam veteran Nicky Pearson, senses something is off about Cassidy. That is by design. The conversation between myself and “This Is Us” writers Jake Schnesel and Kevin Falls in the months prior to filming focused on the connection between the Vietnam and Afghanistan veterans — and, in particular, the sins they both feel are their burden to carry.
On some level, I believe, veterans are unreliable narrators in their own war stories. They are always on the inside looking out, and that perspective — while unique and important — can be limited to a narrow field of vision.
And in the absence of any kind of coherent narrative around the wars, it’s easy for soldiers to assume responsibility for things that are not their fault — to shrink the war down to their own small, horrific experiences, as Army veteran turned writer Adam Linehan put it.
It becomes their war — a war of the mind. And in their war, they feel like the bad guys.
So in that storyline, the U.S. didn’t leave Afghans behind; Cassidy did. Ventimiglia’s Jack didn’t bring all his soldiers back alive. Nicky feels unforgivable for accidentally killing an innocent boy in Vietnam. And for me, it is years of playing the what-if game that might have prevented a little boy from disappearing into a dust cloud of fire and ripped flesh.
After a withdrawal or a surrender or the signing of a peace treaty, the memories of war do not simply get filed away and frozen. They ebb and flow as time passes for those who were there, and for the families impacted when the reverberations of violence rippled outward.
My conclusion from my experience with the “This Is Us” writing process is this: In a storyline about war, and maybe in real life as well, perhaps there’s no better person than a veteran who watched Saigon fall in 1975 to help an Afghanistan veteran navigate the emotional impact of the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Maybe fiction can offer the lesson of how wars of the mind should end — with a connection made, with something added and a path forward in sight, rather than just a tale of all that was lost along the way. A sense that even when we’re not OK, we could be.