BEVERLY HILLS -- Adam Beach would never pretend to fully understand the horrors of war, despite playing a Marine in Clint Eastwood's upcoming World War II epic Flags of Our Fathers.

But as the Winnipeg-born, Ottawa-based Beach told reporters during Flags interviews recently, the anxiety stemming from his divorce several years ago showed him just how fragile the human mind can be.

Now married to second wife Tara Mason and living near his two sons in Ottawa, back then Beach feared he might lose them.

"There was a day I got up from the couch and I almost fell over," he said. "My friends were like 'are you okay? Sit down, sit down.' And I looked, and I saw myself curled up underneath the pool table, wanting to hide."

Beach wanted to hide for the rest of the night until he confessed his thoughts to a buddy, who advised him not to try to control his feelings.

"If you take that little bit and amp it up with watching your best friend begging for his life and hundreds, or thousands of bodies amongst you ... I don't know how any of those veterans got through it," he said. "It's mind-boggling."

The project, which focuses on the historic photo of the American flag-raising on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, appealed to director Eastwood because of how the veterans were forced to deal with their experiences.

"It was a time in history when you didn't have a lot of the psychiatric evaluation and the coddling," he said.

"When you came back, they were just told to go home and get over it."