The National Theatre�s acclaimed production took Los Angeles by storm last week. Foreign Editor David Pratt watched the American debut performance with five men who had first-hand experience of the play�s subject matter ... US war veterans

IT might only have been theatrical pyrotechnics, but it felt and sounded like a real explosion. As the massive percussive thud reverberated throughout the auditorium, the audience winced, and moments later the bloodied bodies of three Scottish soldiers lay sprawled on the ground, victims of an apparent Iraqi suicide bomber.

For most of the audience at Tuesday night's US premiere of the National Theatre of Scotland production, Black Watch, it was just one of many powerful moments when art imitated life.

But for three men watching the scene, and the rest of this phenomenal play, it was a visceral and emotional return to some of the most haunting experiences of their own lives. "It was painful to look at," admitted Captain Danjel Bout, as he sat afterwards sipping a glass of Californian red in a quiet wine bar in the Westwood district of Los Angeles.

Along with Bout were First Lieutenant Eric Everts and Staff Sergeant Mark Tsunokai, with whom he had served as part of the 184th Infantry regiment in some of the worst fighting of the Iraq war.

All three infantrymen know something about the pain that war elicits. And as they began to talk, the Napa Valley wine bar where we had gathered began to seem like the most incongruous place in which to reflect on the horrors of combat in Iraq. Sitting just off the famous Wilshire Boulevard and UCLA campus, where Black Watch is showing as part of the "UCLA Live" International Theatre Festival, the bar is the personification of the Los Angeles dream.

Glitzy, cool, with a clientele not short of a dollar or two, it was staffed by beautiful people whose confidence in recommending the right Zinfandel or Pinot Noir matched their own self-assured good looks.

Nearby, UCLA itself is an institution few would identify with from their own student days. A donor-rich centre of learning, it is inhabited by well-heeled undergraduates, some with personalised number plates on their Porsches.

It is all a far cry from places such as the insurgent-infested Doura district of Baghdad, with its snipers and suicide bombers, where Bout and the men of Alpha Company 184th Infantry often operated.

"I'd never have believed that something like art, and a play like this, could capture what it's like being a soldier in Iraq," confessed Captain Bout, bringing us back to the reality in hand as he and his two comrades began to offer their impressions of the drama.

Before its premiere here, much had been made of just how Black Watch would be politically received in the United States at a time when the war is on everyone's mind, and talk is of troop "drawdown" and looming presidential elections.

Would a patriotic America see the drama simply as the whining of a British liberal left cultural community, hell-bent on delivering an anti-war message? Indeed, would they understand and accept the play at all, given their unfamiliarity with the Scottish vernacular, and the relentless profanities that rattle from the mouths of the characters like machine gun fire?

For infantrymen, Bout, Everts and Tsunokai, their night at the theatre watching this fast-moving rendition of soldiers' lives was a far cry from what they had expected.

"For me, it was more about soldiers generally than the Black Watch specifically, and if there was a message it had to do with esprit de corp rather than anti-war," observed Bout.

Like many combat veterans of Iraq and other conflicts, these three men understand just how profound that "band of brothers" camaraderie can be, and how difficult it is to explain to those who have never "been there".

It was back in 2005, during their deployment around Baghdad, that the men of the 184th Infantry saw the worst action of their tour of duty. On October 27 of that year, during one afternoon alone, the men were to lose their battalion's two commanding officers.

Bout recalls how, on that desperate day, Alpha Company commander, 30-year-old Captain Michael Mackinnon, was blown to pieces when an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) went off as his Humvee passed along a stretch of road known by the men as "the dead zone".

As the unit rushed to the scene in support, the battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel William Wood was killed by a second bomb.

Posthumously promoted to colonel, Wood's death made him the highest-ranking US officer killed in Iraq.

"You can't imagine what it was like, as we walked through the area picking up the pieces of our two senior commanding officers," recalls Bout, describing a scene eerily reminiscent of that depicted towards the end of Black Watch.

For his comrades, too, the play's resonance hit the emotional mark. First Lieutenant Eric Everts is an ex-marine, whose powerful American-footballer build is typical of the physique that occasionally becomes the butt of jokes by the Scottish "squaddies" in Black Watch. "Humour is part of any soldier's survival mechanism," insists Everts, who thought the profanity peppering the play's script would make any soldier feel at home.

Physically tough and with a no-nonsense attitude, it was those same qualities that helped Everts survive unbelievably demanding situations in Iraq and led to him being awarded the Bronze Star for valour in June 2005.

In an incident that could have come straight from the powerful war film Black Hawk Down, he was in a convoy of Humvees that came under ambush in Baghdad from a group of Ansar al-Sunna Islamic insurgents, in what become known as "the battle of West Rashid".

"We ran into everything they had," explained Everts. "They had put diesel on the road to help camouflage the holes they'd cut in the asphalt to plant the lollipops," he recalled, referring to the bombs that use a thin buried signal wire leading to a pressure plate in the road for detonation.

Having eventually fought their way out, Everts's unit regrouped, turned around and went back into the district, routing the insurgents and capturing several hundred of them.

"It's definitely pro-soldier," said Everts, in response to Black Watch, adding that he thought the play captured the often contradictory attitudes and behaviour of soldiers when faced with the traumas they encounter in combat.

"I remember one day when a dog got shot in the street and the guys were upset, and then the next, when we came across a dead woman and all they could talk about was what was for lunch," he recalls, shaking his head at the memory.

On another occasion, around the time of the referendum to approve a permanent constitution for Iraq on October 15, 2005, Everts told how his unit found a nine-year-old Iraqi girl who had been hit in the throat by a bullet fired in celebration at the news.

"It sounds terrible but I remember it was getting late and I was worried that we needed to get out of the neighbourhood before it got dark and the bad guys got time to prepare an ambush," said Everts.

Still alive at that time was Alpha Company commander, Captain Mackinnon, who insisted the unit stay until a Medevac helicopter arrived for the girl.

"Eventually, a chopper arrived and we got her out. The parents came to thank us afterwards for saving her life, but by then Mike was dead," says Everts who wears a metal bracelet with Mackinnon's name and the date of his death that occurred a few weeks later.

While Everts doesn't believe Black Watch will change the minds of many Americans about the war, he reckons it will definitely strike a chord in a nation that remains firmly behind its soldiers, if increasingly wary of its politicians.

Though much of the play is harrowing, it also has its tender and more contemplative moments that the three infantrymen found it easy to identify with.

For Staff Sergeant Mark Tsunokai it was a scene when the Black Watch men are receiving their mail from home that he will remember from his night at the premiere. With no dialogue, each of the characters, locked in their own thoughts, move to a part of the stage in isolation to read their mail alone.

The play's director John Tiffany had each of the cast write imaginary letters to themselves as if they were soldiers overseas, and asked them to develop their own improvised mime and sign language to silently "read" them during the scene. In every case, no cast member knew what was in the others' letters.

"It was really moving, and for me the most memorable moment in the play," admitted Tsunokai, adding that the only thing missing from the scene, in his experience, "was the one guy who never seems to get any mail".

It was in September 2005 that Tsunokai, a small, wiry man, came back to the United States on home leave to see his parents for a few weeks.

"When I left Iraq there were three photographs of those guys we had recently lost, pinned up on the barracks wall, and when I got back there were three more. And in the middle was my best friend."

Today, Bout works as aide to an army general, Everts is one of many Californians who make a living in the hi-tech computer world of Silicon Valley, and Tsunokai has left behind the rigours of Iraq to return to work in a picture framer's. The three men have come back to an existence far removed from their visceral life-or-death experience and one they say seems inhabited by endless inquisitors who are forever asking "what was it like?" or "did you ever kill anyone?"

They have tried to pick up their lives in a country that is struggling to weigh up the service and sacrifice of men and women like them, and increasingly questions why they had to go there in the first place.

For these three veterans of this increasingly unpopular war, a play about Scottish soldiers, delivered in an accent they could only just understand, chimed with their thoughts and feelings and experiences in a way they never thought possible.

Along with the three infantrymen that night at UCLA theatre were two other veterans who had been through many wars and campaigns, from Panama to Desert Storm. Both colonels, William "Bill" Wenger and Bob Klein were likewise affected by what they saw on stage that night.

"The play is a noble, artistic, imaginative, creative and effective effort to make people, many of whom may not otherwise do so, think in some depth and in personal terms about the war and soldiers of the Black Watch, and soldiers in general," Wenger pointed out eloquently after the performance.

Now retired, Wenger believes that such a perspective "is missing from most of the media we see, hear and read". He also insists he will be taking his 17-year-old son along to see the play.

Back in the days of the American civil war, soldiers who had been to battle would speak of "going to see the elephant". The expression originated from the hopeful audience holding a ticket to the exotic PT Barnum circus. The elephant was the last act, and if you hung around long enough to see it, then you had seen it all.

Last Tuesday night, five American soldiers used their tickets to join an audience and see a play that reminded them of what it is like "to see it all."

If Black Watch is anything - it is these soldiers', and every soldier's, story.