Veterans Give Play on War a Realistic Touch : San Diego County

Ted Cloon carries in his pocket a tattered photograph. It’s a picture of Cloon being awarded the Silver Star for bravery in battle. He’ll let you look at it, but only if you ask, and even then he grants the request carefully, as if he isn’t sure he’s doing the right thing.

He blames his hesitation on the mixed feelings most people have about where he earned the Silver Star--a place called Vietnam.

Movies like “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” depict the horror of that war. But for Cloon and five other veterans coaching the actors on the Vietnam War play, “Tracers,” opening tonight at Sushi Gallery, the greatest horror was that the fighting didn’t stop after they came home.

Like prisoners of war, two decades later, they’re trying to escape their tormentors; namely, the enemy of public opinion. It has indicted their role in the war as well as the demons they returned with--drinking, drugs and a fear of intimacy.

Until the veterans were recruited by director Ginny-Lynn Safford to assist on the play, Cloon said, they hadn’t fully shared the pain of Vietnam and their lives beyond it.

“We thought we were heroes,” said Evon Shaw, halting painfully between sentences. “We thought we were doing what we were supposed to do. When we got off the planes, there was no one to greet us. And, if they were there, they were calling us baby killers and spitting on the uniforms. We were depressed. And we had no one to talk to. It was too much for me.”

“You don’t know how good it is to get someone who has never been there and

wants to listen,” added Cloon. “This thing has been inside of us for 20 years. And now they’re listening. Now, at last, I can say, ‘Do you understand?’ This is real therapeutic.”

Safford recruited her coaches from Landing Zone, a 5-year-old, 46-bed alcohol and substance-abuse recovery center sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of San Diego. In Vietnam, the term Landing Zone describes a area used by a helicopter to bring troops and supplies.

The ones who volunteered, said Robert Van Keuren, executive director of Vietnam Veterans of San Diego, are the ones who have made the most progress.

“The others aren’t ready to deal with it yet; I call them MIAs--Missing in America,” said Van Keuren of the Landing Zone residents. “You’re 19 years old and, one minute you’re wiping your friends’ brains off of your jacket and wondering why. Then you come home--48 hours from foxhole to fireside--and people tell you it’s your fault.

“Vietnam is the chicken bone that sticks in the collective American psyche. We keep trying to cough it up, and we can’t. As a nation, we still haven’t dealt with the social costs of war. We’re still trying to figure it out. But at least America has finally started to separate the war from the warrior.”

Van Keuren praised Safford’s newly formed production company, Ensemble Arts Theatre, both for its plan to raise money for his organization on two benefit nights--April 12 and 15--and for bringing attention to the plight of Vietnam veterans. At the same time, he said that, although he wants people to appreciate the gravity of the needs of Vietnam veterans, they shouldn’t assume that all Vietnam veterans share the adjustment problems depicted in the play.

Still, the statistics from the just-released National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, ordered five years ago by Congress, are staggering.

Based on a study of 3,000 Vietnam veterans, about 10% of all Vietnam vets are or have been homeless and 15.2%--an estimated 479,000 out of 3.1 million--have Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). How serious is PTSD? Sixty percent of those with the disorder have alcohol and drug problems and are five times more likely to be unemployed than the general population. They have higher rates for divorce and marital problems. And 30%--close to 1 million--of all Vietnam veterans have had partial or full PTSD sometime in their lives.

In San Diego, 60% of the homeless have been determined to be veterans, although no one has yet figured out what percentage of those are Vietnam veterans.

Safford uses her six coaches to shadow the cast, advising them on how it really happened and how it really felt. That is in the spirit of the original play, written and performed nine years ago by Vietnam veterans. The idea was generated by John Di Fusco and was written in workshop with the original cast of Di Fusco, Vincent Caristi, Richard Chaves, Eric Emerson, Rick Gallavan, Merlin Marston, Harry Stephens and writer Sheldon Lettich.

The play was written in 1980, with a group of veterans talking out the parts. “Tracers” begins with the fresh-faced kids before the war, takes them through the war, and deals with them trying to recover from war.

“Tracers” has also proved a healing process for the the vets and an eye-opener for the cast, one of whom was of draft age during the Vietnam War but refused to serve.

Six days a week for the past few weeks, the conversations between vets and actors have extended for hours, resembling--by their own descriptions--group-therapy sessions.

“With each person, you get a sense of being a casualty,” said one of the actors, Tim West, who plays the soldier they call “Professor.”

“But what makes you a casualty also makes you a survivor. You lose your innocence--too bad. But, if you don’t lose your innocence, you’d be dead.”

As an example, one of the veterans, Cody Rios, recalled a boy from Waco, Tex., who reminded him of the character in the play called Baby San.

This recruit came to his unit never having had a cigarette or a beer or the need to shave.

“He still got his church newsletter,” Cody said. “In about six weeks, he was ready to execute anyone without a trial.”

“You have to lose something to survive,” Shaw explained. “Emotions die. You can’t kill and not lose emotions.”

Actor Duke Windsor, who plays Habu, continued Shaw’s thought.

“Baby San looks normal,” Windsor said. “But he lost any ability to feel emotion or love or caring. That had to go if he was going to stay alive.”

“That was the deepest wound to me,” Shaw added softly.

“In 1978, I had a friend in Texas,” said Rios. “Now I don’t have anyone. I was his best man on a Thursday. He died in a car accident and I buried him on Wednesday. My girlfriend said, ‘Did you feel anything?’ Not a tear. To this day, my sister gets on my case. She says I’m dead on the inside.

“The last time I felt something was in 1970, when a friend in Vietnam went on a round for me and he was killed. I felt I should have died in his place. That I felt for a long, long time.”

The timing of the play reflects a coming of age in American perceptions about the war. At first, glutted with coverage of the first nationally televised war that also turned out to be perceived as America’s first defeat, no one seemed interested in making movies about the subject.

An early movie on the war, “Coming Home,” painted a Vietnam veteran played by Bruce Dern as a villain. Americans were angry about the war and its cost in lives, its transformation of America in public opinion from the hero of World War II to a Goliath felled by a tiny David of a country.

Now, as the Soviets seek U. S. advisers to help ease their soldiers over the trauma of serving in Afghanistan, America finally seems ready to acknowledge the long-term pain felt by the veterans who risked their lives only to become the first generation of veterans to receive jeers and ostracism instead of ticker-tape parades and jobs on their return home.

The opening of “Tracers” coincides with that of “Jackknife,” a movie about Vietnam veterans that La Jolla resident Stephen Metcalfe adapted from his play “Strange Snow.”

Like “Tracers,” “Jackknife” addresses the pain of a homecoming that leaves the returned soldier feeling alien in his own land. Years after the war has ended, Robert De Niro, as Megs, compares the task of spurring his now-alcoholic buddy (Ed Harris) to get on with his life with saving a buddy in the line of combat.

Each of the vets shadowing the cast in “Tracers” has comparable tales to tell, with the exception that no one here has yet been saved from their alcohol or drug-abuse problems, their failed marriages or unemployment. But all are counting the days they have been clean--one month, two months, three--and hoping.

“The play gives me an opportunity to relive the emotions in the play,” said Shaw. “The actors want to know the emotion for every line. It gives us the opportunity to show the public how we feel, as opposed to how they want to see us.”

Cloon recently wrote a poem about the feelings:

“I was brought up to obey, not protest;

to do my duty without question.

So, as Dad had done in World War II,

I joined the Army to serve my nation.

While my buddies were working, and

taking pretty girls for rides;

I was kneeling in a rice field,

hugging a friend that had just died.

They said we were in Vietnam,

So America would be free.

But little did I know,

What their thoughts were of me.

We flew back home together,

like thieves in the night.

Streams of red light, like tracers below;

‘Oh God please, not another fire fight.”

No parade, no memorial;

only hate and despair.

I looked at his bag and asked,

“Why do they stare?”

We did as we were told,

like our brothers used to do;

I looked at him in silence,

“Make that casket for two.”