‘VETS’ UNMASKS HEROISM WITH ANTI-WAR MESSAGE

Donald Freed’s last name is apt. Liberation is an important theme for the Los Angeles playwright, especially when he talks about his belief that society--through theater--can be freed from its self-destructive assumptions about power and militarism.

In his newest play, “Vets,” the Vietnam War’s most-decorated hero guns down the President of the United States.

“Vets” won’t undergo a full-scale production for about a year, opening in Denver before a production is staged at the Los Angeles Theater Center. But its first public reading, at the Unitarian Church of Orange County in Anaheim last weekend, showed that Freed is challenging established truth as aggressively as when he co-authored a controversial nonfiction book on the killing of a Chilean diplomat, and in his well-received play-turned-film about Richard Nixon, “Secret Honor.”

But he is not content to let his work speak for itself. Among like-minded friends Saturday, in a church that has a 20-year tradition of liberal activism in a largely conservative county, he took to the podium and declaimed views that culminated in one question:

“Sixty-thousand boys at the Somme one day and 60,000 the next--what species cannot expect to sacrifice generation after generation, parts of its gene pool, and not expect to be selected against in the Darwinian race for survival?”

The point of his play, he said, is that the only solution to war is “a new ethic, an ethic in which war is shameful” and “the superego, of John Wayne and Rambo and Col. North” can be erased.

While movies like “Platoon” can offer horrifying images of men at the front, Freed said they don’t deeply probe habitual perceptions about the justifiability of war that stop a society from changing itself: “Someone is always coming to get us--the communists, the Christians, the Jews. And someone is always on the ramparts telling us that someone is coming to get us . . . there was the first war and the second war and now we’re on the razor’s edge. We have to learn to think for ourselves, to invent another value system.”

The plot of this latest work--read by one professional actor and two amateurs--focuses on three characters: Walter Kercelik, hero of the Vietnam War, who reveals that he killed five of his own men for eating a Vietnamese baby; John Halloway, a shellshocked World War I veteran of the battle of the Marne, and John MacCormick Butts, a veteran of World War II, who owns car dealerships in Long Beach and declares at one point: “I’m an Elk. I’m VFW and Legion. I’m Rotary. I’m a Moose, I’m a Lion, I’m an Oddfellow.”

The whole play takes place in a day room in a Veterans Administration hospital before a ceremonial visit by the unnamed American President and mostly consists of dialogue between Kercelik and Butts. Halloway sits in a wheelchair between them, his eyes closed. Layer by layer, Butts’ assumptions about the symbolism of Halloway and the heroism of Kercelik fall away.

Finally, it becomes clear that Kercelik sees himself as an avenger for all the soldiers ever sent to die. The play ends as he sets out to kill the President.

“When we die in a war, any war, they count us--both sides--so they can tell who won,” Kercelik tells Butts. “We count. The Commander, he doesn’t count--he counts us, after we’re dead, so they’ll know who won. All those crosses out there, as far as you can see, everyone of them counts. Especially the ones without names. . . .”

Freed, 54, admits that the work has a propagandistic quality but says he also intends it as engaging theater. Indeed, many of the 40 or so people at the reading often laughed at Freed’s dissection of the military mind and the blustery Butts’ conventional wisdom. Some seemed to recognize various war songs the playwright used to reach back through the century for the mix of sentimentality and cynicism with which many veterans look back.

Freed, a tall man with closely cropped hair and dark eyes, is not a veteran, although he was eligible to fight in Korea in his early 20s.

Freed said in an interview that he was reclassified to an ineligible status after he convinced an army psychiatrist that he was cut out to be an artist and not a soldier. “I joined a long and honorable tradition dating back to the exile of Euripides, who opposed the war against Syracuse and whose play, ‘The Trojan Women,’ was considered a subversive, anti-war propaganda tract,” Freed said. “I have fought battles, however. I have used what Gandhi called the weapons of the brave. I was arrested during the civil rights movement when I founded a West Coast group to help the Black Panthers, and again with the Berrigan brothers when we demonstrated in Los Angeles against the bombing of Cambodia.”

At the end of the “Vets” reading, a number of audience members asked questions and shared thoughts, giving the kind of response for which Freed brought the play here for its first public exposure. He has close friends in the church, and the politically sympathetic surroundings included a sign on one wall that proclaimed, “Russia Stopped Testing. Why Don’t We?” There was another poster with a quote from civil liberties activist Roger Baldwin: “It is still a time of change--one world or none.” And yet another sign said “Let Nicaragua Live.”

Members of the group approached Freed after the reading and asked the writer to autograph “Death in Washington,” in which Freed and two other writers allege CIA complicity in the car-bomb murder of Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier. (A group of former CIA officers sued Freed and his colleagues over the book, and he said Saturday that the authors settled last year in court for $1 and issued a retraction because they ran out of money to fight the case.) Members of the Unitarian Church of Orange County, which Freed called “a storm center of humanism in Orange County,” have long been active in civil rights and anti-war movements since the 1960s. But the writer, whose play “Inquest” was directed on Broadway by Alan Schneider and whose “Circe & Bravo” recently played in a London production with actress Faye Dunaway, says he hopes the play’s impact will cross political and ideological boundaries.

“It’s not really a political play,” he said. “What appears to be the politics of war goes beyond that . . . the metaphor for our lives is war. We have a war state and a war religion. Christianity has been turned into a war religion. This play takes a superpatriot and a super soldier (Kercelik) and brings him into a confrontation with himself as a man and as a symbol.

“I believe that theater itself is the answer to war, the antidote. We are sitting here quiet and reasonable. There is no chance of anything happening to us, and for a short period of time we have a chance to be human.”