Review of comedian Bill Posley's account of serving in the US military

Bill Posley is not your stereotypical soldier: a gentle, easy-going, unathletic type who seems more likely to be battling gluten than Al Qaeda.

But then one of the points he makes in his thoroughly engaging monologue The Day I Accidentally Went To War is that those who end up in the military often don’t conform to the action-man ideal promulgated by Hollywood or gung-ho politicians.

His case is probably far from atypical. A poor biracial kid with an underwhelming academic record, he signed up as a National Guard reservist – reputedly the least militaristic arm of the military – at the age of 17 as the only way he’d be able to get his college fees covered. 

We hear about his family background – an ex-Air Force father and gambling addict mother – and how he went through basic training, most notably involving a horrific experience in the ‘gas chamber’. And then, rather than packing off to higher education, 9/11 happened, and the teenage Posley found himself shipped out to Iraq to be a gunner on a patrol tasked with rescuing abandoned convoy vehicles.

Posley drops a few home truths about the make-up of the US military and its treatment of its veterans while vividly telling both the good and bad sides of his experiences with a good dollop of humanity.

 A turning point in his war, for example, was when he treated ordinary Iraqi people as scared civilians, not terrorists-in-waiting, as he had been trained to see them. He also tells how the military gave him both camaraderie with brothers-in-arms he would most likely never have been friends with in real life, and a much-needed sense of purpose.

Posley is a warm, witty performer with the charisma to light up an evening like a Patriot missile – and whatever his pitiful high school grades might suggest, he’s also a smart, astute commentator. The monologue is simply but effectively staged, too, from the camo netting that decks the stage to the audience warm-up, having us respond to prompts with the Marine Corps battle cry of:  ‘Oo-rah!’

However, despite his credentials as a comedian – he’s a writer on Apple TV+’s Shrinking – he’s more concerned with telling a rounded story than landing a laugh on every beat. He shoehorns a few comic devices into the story – a love of a certain Backstreet Boy, for example – to keep things amusing. But there’s very little amusing about PTSD, and he doesn’t attempt to leaven it, even if there are hints of yet-darker consequences of seeing action he avoids delving too far into.  

The final section of the show is heavy on the messaging: the lack of support given to troops trying to fit back into society and how his time with the National Guard taught him to get along with those who, on the surface, he had little in common with. His conclusion, that society’s becoming tribal, hating other people on arbitrary lines, when we’re all a mass of contradictions ourselves, comes as no surprise.

In fact, he’s a bit heavy-handed in spelling out his messaging in this home straight, and the show could be safely trimmed to the traditional hour rather than the 75 minutes it runs for. Despite that, The Day I Accidentally Went To War is an insightful look at what military life is like in all its aspects, from a supremely personable comedian.

• The Day I Accidentally Went To War is at Soho Theatre in London at 8.30pm from tonight to Saturday.

Review date: 8 Sep 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Soho Theatre