A seven-year-old boy leaves school without his coat in mid-winter, walking the streets for over two hours until he ends up at the Petawawa Military Family Resource Centre. He's distraught and needs to talk to somebody, afraid for his father who's serving with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan.

Another boy would panic in class whenever someone was called to the office -- because it likely meant another soldier has died, another classmate has lost a parent.

A screening of "Iron Man" at a movie theatre on the military base was cut short because the film's opening sequence portrays a terrible firefight in Afghanistan. The little sons and daughters of Canadian soldiers were thinking of their fathers and mothers, crying.

These were just a few of the stories that Human Cargo Theatre's Christopher Morris gleaned firsthand from the families and close friends of soldiers from a community around a Canadian Forces base in Eastern Ontario.

Moved deeply by what he heard, Morris titled his theatre project after Petawawa -- home of Canadian Forces Base Petawawa.

Human Cargo's mission for this project is to explore the repercussions of war on the families of Canadian, Afghan, and Pakistani soldiers. Morris aims to produce the show in Petawawa, Toronto, Lahore, Islamabad and Kabul throughout the fall of 2010 -- before Canada's committed withdrawal date for its troops from Afghanistan in 2011.

There are about 6,000 people connected to the base, living in Petawawa itself and in local communities in the picturesque Ottawa Valley.

Morris went alone last year to introduce himself to the community, hanging out at the Tim Hortons. He was hoping to meet anybody who might want to share their stories of what it's like to have a husband or wife, a son or daughter, a girlfriend or boyfriend, fighting over 9,000 kilometres away.

He said he wondered at first who would possibly want to open up to this theatre guy from Toronto. "But what ended up happening was I met some absolutely brilliant and fantastic people that I've kept in touch with all year."

He promised them their names would not be mentioned, unless they wanted it. "I was frank, I told them that I know nothing about any of this, and that I wanted to make sure we spent enough time together to do this properly. I don't want to be in Toronto writing about it, making it all up."

Having made connections with a dozen family members and close friends of soldiers over a period of two weeks, he returned in July of this year with two actors -- Benjamin Clost and Janet Porter -- and writer Jonathan Garfinkel. They rented a cottage across the lake from the base, where they got used to the sound of artillery fire and helicopters flying low over the water during training exercises. And together, with the help of those who shared their stories, they completed Human Cargo Theatre's first four-week workshop.

Preparing for deployment

Morris said he found that the messages given to children were variations of "Daddy or mommy is going to Afghanistan, so that kids your age can go to school."

"I think not all families, but most, try to protect children from being exposed to the realities of war," said Morris. "News isn't a thing to have on in the house, or newspapers."

But he met with one family with a very different, almost brutally practical, approach to the father's upcoming tour of duty.

"Right in front of their kids, the mother goes, 'I have to think my husband's probably going to die. And if he does, I'm going to move on. I'm secure, I have a job. We're not going to hide anything from our children -- this is the way it is."

And the way it is, according to some military spouses who spoke to Morris, is that the military itself devotes too few resources to help soldiers' families cope.

While he said the military does keep an office at the resource centre, where the seven-year-old boy ended up that winter day, it's really the workers and volunteers at that not-for-profit who do the heavy lifting.

Morris mentions a "great group committed to helping kids and youth," that works with schools to try to better take care of their emotional needs.

"For example, if there's bad news, where the kid's father is killed -- they were trying to figure out the best way to tell them. Like figuring out not to call the kids to the office, where they then have to endure that long terrible walk down the hall."

People at the centre told Morris they see a lot of kids with emotional problems, eating disorders, and routine difficulties with school work. "This is a new generation of people who are affected by the war in Afghanistan," said Morris.

As for the spouses and friends of soldiers, he was struck by how "everybody was in a different place."

Two women who lost their best friend in Afghanistan in March were eager to share their memories of him, and commemorated him in a very permanent way. "There are a lot of memorial tattoos you see people get when someone dies," said Morris. "Their friend the soldier had tattooed on his arm: 'No one ever really dies.' So they got the same message done right across their breastbones, in really nice writing. You see lots of stuff like that."

A military wife, meanwhile, questioned the premise of Morris's project. "She said to me, 'All I hear in the news is soldiers, soldiers, soldiers. Well, what about the firemen, the policemen who put their lives on the line every day? We're not putting up half the fuss for them when they die. You should do a play on them, on their wives'."

Some fall apart

Morris said one of the major things he gained throughout this process was a far greater sympathy for the experience of the soldiers.

"For me, my job is my mind, my voice, some kind of artistic skill that I have. Theirs is physical force. And the whole idea of your body being owned by the military -- that as part of your job, your body might get blown to pieces -- I gained a greater appreciation for what that does to the psyche of the soldier, and how it affects the family."

And the question of why some soldiers fall apart, while others don't, fascinated him. "Some suffer severe PTSD, while in one case a soldier described to me how it was an 'awesome' experience, like a real-life Playstation game."

A woman in her 20s told Morris her boyfriend returned from his deployment with burns and scars on his face. He had told her that a suicide bomber attacked near him, and he was sprayed with the man's burning innards.

"In my mind, whoever knows that story -- all of a sudden that is a reality now to a small town in Ontario. This becomes part of a psyche of a small town. That has an affect to a culture -- a society. Who knows what long-term reverberations that will have? But I think it has to be opened up, talked about, and understood."