With the first few lines of ReEntry, playwrights KJ Sanchez and Emily Ackerman’s treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans returning home from war, the audience at Center Stage’s Head Theater is supposed to imagine they’re being introduced to boot camp. It’s a fairly convincing moment. The opening MC—the Commanding Officer—stomps onstage in his desert camouflage to school the audience in the logic behind basic training. And actor Joe Harrell is a former Marine Corps CO who spent a decade in the corps as a drill instructor.

Indeed, Marines can be good actors. While Harrell is no R. Lee Ermey yet, he has the charisma. But the links between thespians and grunts get even tighter. According to program notes, Harrell has also led the rest of the cast in a mini boot camp. ReEntry has received high marks and much feedback at several Marine bases. Sanchez and Ackerman have put in research time at the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. And, in an interesting twist, the play is supported in part by Northrop Grumman—the world’s fourth largest defense contractor—and the National Endowment for the Arts.

ReEntry is, in fact, embedded theater. And it comes with the ups and downs of embedded journalism. It offers you direct access to interviews culled from more than 1,000 actual participants in the current war on terror, including combatants and their families. In an 85-minute play you get unfiltered accounts of what it’s like to return to the United States after serving abroad in combat. It also hopelessly scrambles the relationships between playwrights, actors, subjects, and characters in a production that is an awkward mix of The Vagina Monologues and Full Metal Jacket.

First, though, the upside: ReEntry lets you hear about the war directly from those who fight it. Ackerman and Sanchez (who is also the director) have culled the script from stories collected in their interviews, which get delivered without annoying bravura touch-ups or plot devices. After almost a decade of fighting an invisible enemy at the behest of a nation not known for its attention span, the warrior class has itself become invisible. The story of the two wars is still a work in progress, and the audience is witness to veterans genuinely trying to figure out how their own experiences and traumas fit into the weird, politically poisonous country to which they return.

One CO recalls his experience of walking down a highway right by a dying Iraqi boy. A wounded vet comes back to the country and finds himself getting ready to hammer a bunch of 13-year-old skate punks—but he abstains. A Marine wife talks about how she wakes up her husband only to narrowly escape strangulation. It’s refreshing to hear stories like that told without forcing any exchanges or crisis. Sanchez and Ackerman provide that opportunity.