THEATER SAW VIETNAM ‘AS IT REALLY WAS’

As noted in the Feb. 25 Calendar, “Platoon” is the film of the moment--and not a moment too soon. Kids high from last summer’s “Top Gun” needed to be wised up as to what combat smells like on the ground. “Platoon” provides the information.

It’s the toughest look that Hollywood has ever taken at the Vietnam War, and this has led some commentators to treat it as an absolute breakthrough: the first time that anyone has dared to portray Vietnam “as it really was.”

Not true. We have had stage plays on the Vietnam War almost since the war began, many of them written by people who had seen action there. These plays were just as unsparing as “Platoon,” at a time when Americans weren’t terribly anxious to think about Vietnam “as it really was.” Those who saw these plays were forced to think about it.

The first one was written by a woman, Megan Terry. Terry’s “Viet Rock” (1966) took its body counts from the headlines and its form from a Open Theatre exercise known as “the transformation,” in which company members would jump-cut from one identity to the other--here, from a grieving mother to a tough drill sergeant to a fatuous U.S. official claiming that North Vietnam had already been “tactically defeated.”

“Viet Rock’s” surreal vision suited a war where one couldn’t get a fix on the enemy or the objective. The piece ended with an image of rebirth, but the image that stayed with the viewer was a mound of dead soldiers, male and female, muttering “Who needs this?”

John Guare’s “Muzeeka”--first performed at the Mark Taper Forum in 1967--cartooned the war as a TV “special” invented by the networks. Guare’s hero was a twerp who welcomed the war as a chance to avoid having to make any decisions about his life. “War is God’s invention to make us remember we are animals. Everything is out of my hands.”

Luis Valdez wrote “El Soldado Razo” for a Chicano rally against the war in Fresno in 1971. Here, again, there was grim humor as Death--the emcee--told the audience not to worry, he hadn’t come for them. He had come to tell them a story. It’s about how how Johnny said farewell to his family and his sweetheart and went off to Vietnam, thinking, “ Ahora, si, now I’m a man. . . .”

Since Johnny’s fate is foregone, the piece concentrates on the neighborhood party before he leaves. His sweetheart’s family used to scorn him as a vato . Now they loan him the family car. “They say he’s more responsible now that he’s in the service.”

Next, Johnny’s buying a ticket for the Oakland-Vietnam bus at the Greyhound Depot. “Round trip or one way?” “One way.” “Right.” And Death sells him his ticket with a grin.

The piece ends with Johnny writing home about torching a Vietnam village and dreaming, later, that he had killed his own familia . “Please tell all the vatos what it’s like over here. Don’t let them--”

But Death doesn’t let him finish the sentence.

The hero of “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel” (1969) was nobody’s pride and joy. David Rabe’s play took a hard line about the modern Army, far harder than “Platoon” was to take. It refused to celebrate the innocence of pink-cheeked recruits. It refused to celebrate the comradeship of men at arms. It refused to see any good in the experience at all.

Ron Boussom played Pavlo superbly at South Coast Repertory in 1973. Rabe’s hero begins his Vietnam tour as a jerk and ends it as a dead jerk. Everybody in his outfit thinks he’s weird, and he thinks they’re weird. The one thing he learns in the service is how to tell another guy off--which is what gets him wasted. In a bar, not on the battlefield.

But he does see action. “I’m diggin’ it, man,” he says to a shadowy figure named Ardell. “Blowin’ people away. Cuttin’ ‘em down. Got two this afternoon I saw and one I didn’t even see. . . .”

“Like bringing down a deer,” says Ardell.

“Man, people’s all I ever killed,” says Pavlo.

Pavlo also does time as a hospital corpsman. One of his patients is a soldier who has had his lower body blown away by a land mine. He refers to himself as “the egg that slept” and routinely asks his visitors to shoot him. Rabe served in the army from 1965 to 1967, and his play feels like a first-hand report from the field, before the censors got hold of it. A movie this grim probably couldn’t be made.

“Tracers” had its premiere at the Odyssey Theatre on July 4, 1980. This was a first-hand report, put together by John DiFusco and seven other Vietnam vets who felt the need to do some personal witnessing before the war was entirely forgotten.

As in “Pavlo Hummel,” the language is alive and the images come from experience. “I didn’t smoke dope until I got to this green suck,” says a grunt, lighting up. Collecting corpses after a battle, the soldiers suddenly start tossing human parts at each other, as in a food fight. After six months in Vietnam, everybody’s a little dinky dau (crazy).

After a year you go home. “Tracers” deals with this, too. It carries its G.I.’s into the 1980s, done with the war, but not able to put it behind them. Then it denies what we’ve just seen and shows us that its soldiers actually died in a fire fight.

The viewer realizes that both endings are true. A lot of men died in Vietnam (the play is dedicated to “the 59,000who missed the Freedom Bird”) and a lot of men got out of it alive. There wasn’t any dramatic inevitability to it. War is a crap shoot.

Yet “Tracers” also exhibits a certain nostalgia for the war. “Somehow I want to say that it was a good time,” says a character named Baby San--meaning: a time when your buddies were there for you and when life seemed sweet because it was so obviously at risk.

“Platoon” shows that same grudging admiration for war as a catalyst of manhood: the experience that tells you what you are made of. Not too far from those Army ads in Rolling Stone about being all that you can be. Compare Pavlo Hummel’s epiphany:

“So they take him, they put him in a blue rubber bag, zippit uptight and haul him off to the morgue in the back of a quarter ton where he got stuck naked into the refrigerator long with the other boys killed that day and the beer and tuna and stuff the guys who work at the morgue kept in the refrigerator except when it inspection time . . . Pavlo Hummel, passin’ by.”