Saturday evening at Diane Benson's house, part 2: A Tlingit drum played the role of her battle-wounded son

In the dark, wee, hours of that most bitter morning in November, 2005, just after Diane had learned her son had lost his legs in Iraq and was now fighting for his life, she pushed her tears aside and picked up a little red book of her poetry. She then read to me a poem she had written when he was 12. In it, she recalled him as he been from birth to then and described her vision of the war she feared he would one day face. Somehow, even then she had known. This Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Diane will perform a play of her own authorship and choreography, Act 3 of which tells her own story as a mother whose heart and soul suffered the wounds of war as surely as did the legs and body of her only son.

She had never performed Act 3 before an audience but felt a need to do so before she went to London. She invited a few close friends over and so performed her premiere showing before an audience of seven. In Act 3, Diane relates how she named her son Latseen, Tlingit for “Strength.” She knew he would grow to be a Strong Man. When he was 18, he drove off to do a cross-country motorcycle trip in the Lower 48. Immediately after 9/11, Latseen announced he was going to join the Army. He wanted to go to Afghanistan and bring bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice. Instead, he served in the spearpoint in the invasion of Iraq. He returned safely, his four year commitment came to an end and, just as he made plans to get on with life, he was sent back to Iraq under “Stop Loss.”

In Act 3, she reads the same poem she read to me seven years ago. In the most extended scene of the act, Diane reenacts the flight she made with her son and several of his fellow Wounded Warriors from Germany to the US. She moves from stretcher to stretcher – suspended three high – to speak with, comfort and take comfort from all the Wounded Warriors. She also gestures to and communicates with the Tlingit drum pictured – her son. As they fly, they become as one family, she, the mother, all of them her sons, brothers of her son Latseen.

For all the grief, worry, grief and sadness, Latseen, The Strong Man, has gone on to make a good life and family with wife Jessica and to become a Wounded Warrior Olympics star. Diane will be performing the play as part of Origins: Festival of First Nations under the title of When My Spirit Raised Its Hands, her original name for Act 1, her famous play about Native Rights Activist Elizabeth Peratrovich, Tlingit. Peratrovich's impromptu speech before the Alaska Territorial Senate in 1945 turned the tables on some racist Senators and led to Alaska's Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945.