With the help of jazz trumpeter Dominick Farinacci, Jaymes Poling has tried to capture his time fighting for the Army — and returning home — into the unusual ‘Modern Warrior LIVE’

Between 2007 and 2013, Poling served three tours of duty, totaling more than three years, in the Middle East as an infantryman with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, earning the rank of staff sergeant. Now, a few years removed from the Army, he says he did learn some things about himself and, like so many others, lives with lasting effects from serving in combat.

In a collaboration with another Northeast Ohio native, acclaimed jazz trumpeter Dominick Farinacci, Poling channels his thoughts and reflections on his experiences into an unusual narrative, “Modern Warrior LIVE.” It plays Oct. 6 at the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square in Cleveland.

Poling says he regularly hears a basic question about his time in the Army — a version of which he gets during this recent phone interview — that’s not so simple to answer: How was that?

“My first thought is always, ‘Well, it was everything. It was three years of life, and everything you feel over three years of life I felt over there. It’s just my environment was different, and the situation was different.’”

He says he met “amazing people,” in and out of the military, and saw beautiful places.

But there also was the fighting.

“It was so much more than I ever could have imagined,” he says. “I did discover things about myself. They kind of came in waves.”

After the first tour, in which he lost no one very close to him, there was the feeling of invincibility you might expect from a young person in such a situation.

“I came back from my first deployment very much with this sense of, ‘OK, I get why people get addicted to this — I want to keep feeling this.’”

During his second deployment, however, a close friend was killed in battle.

“That was sort of the low for me,” Poling says. “From there, I started to take on a more mature look at the fighting. And then it became, ‘I want to lead men to the best of my ability; I want to bring the men back.’”

And, before finishing his career in the military, a man he knew in the Army committed suicide, he says.

“I left the military with that in the back of my mind,” he says. “I wasn’t dealing with any suicidal issues myself, but I was dealing with depression and grief.”

He says the first time he heard the term “PTSD,” aka post-traumatic stress disorder, was overseas. After an intense multi-day stretch of combat in Musa Qala, Afghanistan, a person not qualified to make such a diagnosis made what sounds like an off-hand remark that his whole unit now had PTSD.