I returned from my first deployment to Iraq as an infantryman in late 2007, but I still heard the war – it was alive in the voices of my fellow soldiers. The military communities in Germany, my duty station, were bubbles where everyone saw each other in the same bars. Drunken soldiers would perform their pain with one another in predictable ways.

I began to call it “The Bluster.” They’d take any excuse – a jostle, a joke, a glance – to start a confrontation. They repeated certain phrases: “I’m already going to hell, so what does it matter if I kill one more person?” It was sad, of course. But The Bluster was so over-the-top that it was hard to take at face value. Instead, it seemed a dramatization of the guilt and anger of war itself.

For military veterans, the arts can help – but can they heal?