The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Dramatic experience
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’
Jaymes Poling was attending Labrae High School in the Warren area when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. ¶ “I don’t think it necessarily hit me that I wanted to go fight because of it,” the 31-year-old Poling recalls. “I don’t think it was that typical patriotic response that a lot of people have.” ¶ Instead, he says, he came to think of the war in Afghanistan as an opportunity for growth. ¶ “‘I don’t really know where I want to go or what I want to do in life,’” he recalls thinking, “‘but I think if I can put myself in some of those situations, I might discover some things about myself.’”
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.
Back at home following his service, however, a physician suggested to Poling he may actually be suffering from it, he says.
Poling says he has mixed feelings about the label; he personally prefers to work on individual effects of trauma he experiences.
“I understand the need to have a term that applies to vets and helps vets,” he says. “At the same time, as a veteran, the first time you hear that term affixed to your name, you’re like, ‘Oh, wow — now I have something else I have to work on.’”
Poling talks of moving to Cleveland after the Army and being able to truly “breathe” for the first time in a long time. He says he also tried to find his trigger points when he was alone.
“Sitting on my couch, I would keep making myself relive all those worst parts of my life,” he says, “and in doing so, I felt I was emotionally diluting them and getting control of them again.”
He also started attending classes at Cuyahoga Community College after meeting a girl. (“I really liked her, and I wanted her to stick around,” he says.)
“As soon as I signed up for classes, I reconnected with the ambition from the military,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is easy. School is easy, comparatively.’”
He later went on to John Carroll University, where, he says, he recently completed a finance degree.
During his time at John Carroll, an acquaintance from Tri-C had contacted him because Farinacci, who is from Solon and who had attended the community college years earlier, was looking for a vet to talk to about his experiences to help with a music video the trumpet player was making for his cover of Tom Waits’
“Soldier’s Things.” “I remember thinking, ‘The last thing I want to do in the world is a music video with a musician. I couldn’t care less about this,’” he says with a laugh. He laughs because meet they did, and connect on a vision they have. That work on the music video
“Our goal is to provide a platform and start the conversation in a way that civilians and vets can come away asking questions and sharing a dialogue they didn’t feel like they could have before the show.” — Jaymes Poling, co-creator of “Modern Warrior LIVE”
led to their collaboration on “Modern Warrior LIVE.”
“When we started putting this together, we were like, ‘Hey, let’s make something that focuses on the human experience. If we’re going to put something out there, let’s put something out there that people can rally behind and say, OK, we can all agree on these things. We all can back this. We all know what it’s like to feel this.’”
The goal, he continues was to share the veteran experience in a way that others can relate to it, even if just a little.
“Not all veterans, but some veterans say, ‘It’s not worth trying to talk to civilians about what happens — they’ll never get it. If you haven’t lived it, you’ll never get it.’ And, to an extent, that’s understandable.
“And on the civilian side, you see so many civilians who say, ‘Well, I’m never going to get this. Why shouldn’t I just thank them for their service and kind of move on?’ You know, don’t poke, don’t prod, or any of that. And to an extent, I get that, but I wasn’t happy leaving the conversation there.”
The show pairing Poling’s narrative with Farinacci’s music. is billed as “a musical drama telling the story of an infantryman and his transition back home” in a news release from Tri-C and is being presented in Cleveland as part of the Tri-C Performing Arts Series.
“Our goal is to provide a platform and start the conversation in a way that civilians and vets can come away asking questions and sharing a dialogue they didn’t feel like they could have before the show,” he says. “And after the show, we sit down, pass the microphone around the audience and we talk to the audience to try to start that conversation.”
“Modern Warrior LIVE” was performed about a year ago at Tri-C in what Poling says was still its workshop phase. They since have put it on about 30 times around the country, in settings ranging from performing arts centers to hospitals and even medical conferences. Next month, he says, they are slated to bring it to the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City.
He has gotten some of the kind of feedback he’d hoped, so the experience has been highly gratifying.
“My fear initially was this would be a draining process for me, right? I’m taking the worst parts of my life and putting them on stage,” he says. “But what I’ve found in these conversations afterwards — and just watching the audience during the show — it’s been the exact opposite. It’s been energizing. Seeing how it’s impacted some people has really made this a passion of mine.”