How to Tell a True War Story: The Dramaturgy and Staging of Narrative Theatre

As a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I experienced many of the waves of agitation that moved a generation of college students. Arriving on campus two years after the beginnings of the free speech movement, I witnessed dissent that led to the People’s Park protest, turmoil over what were termed “Third World” issues, and the garbage strike. Students rallied for “power to the people,” solidarity with workers, and academic programs recognizing the cultures of people of color. Most particularly, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, they demonstrated against on-campus ROTC, the draft, and United States involvement in Southeast Asia. The turbulence, conflict, and dissonance of those years produced what Maurice Isserman has called “an inherent drama that’s hard to match” in which “innocence, risk, sacrifice, confrontation, death, idealism, disillusionment all play into the narrative” (806).

The passion fueling these issues often obscured their complexity from both college students and the rest of the American public. One such problematic phenomenon was the American soldier in Vietnam. Warriors in an unpopular conflict, soldiers became symbols of a war that divided the country on principles, policy, and patriotism—a visual synecdoche on the nightly news. The need for their presence was not as clear-cut to the public as it had seemed in World War II. For the conscripted young men who had to serve but did not want to, there was no safe insulation from the war. A soldier’s stance against the conflict did not absolve him from being a villain in the eyes of those who opposed it. Many nonparticipants made no distinction between the warrior and the war: if you went to ’Nam, you were part of the war machine. The relentless logic of the situation was summed up by the popular bumper sticker: “Join the Army: Travel to Exotic Places, Meet New People—And Kill Them.”

For years afterwards, I was not fully aware of the extent of my grief about the cataclysm that marked my generation. Simplistic cinematic portrayals of the raging wounded vet or the larger-than-life superman left me untouched. These superficial and convenient representations of the war enabled Americans to remain distanced from the veterans’ experiences and from their own confusion and guilt about the conflict. When Tracers, a collaborative improvisational work by eight Vietnam veterans, came out in 1983, its veracity regarding the war and its aftermath inspired me to propose directing the play for our theatre season at Central Michigan University. My request was denied; the play was considered “inappropriate” for such a venue. Language and subject matter were cited as reasons for this decision, yet I suspected another explanation. In the 1980s, the play was too confrontational in terms of the role it asked its audience to assume. The powerful ending builds to what the play calls a “sardonic subtext” (107) to the kinds of questions veterans are often asked (when they are asked anything at all) about their having been in Vietnam and concludes with the repetition of, “How does it feel to kill somebody?” (108) While the play ends with a celebration of soldiers’ survival, it also stresses in a clear and compelling way the anger these veterans feel toward nonveterans.

In 1990, Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien produced a work that offered different ways of understanding a soldier’s experience than I had yet encountered. The novel, The Things They Carried, was O’Brien’s third book about Vietnam, following If I Die in A Combat Zone (1973), in which he writes about his life as a draftee, and his 1979 National Book Award winner Going After Cacciato, in which a young soldier escapes the brutal realities of the Vietnam War by taking an imaginary journey to Paris. The Things They Carried is a sequence of twenty-two interconnected stories that gain the force of a novel through recurring characters and intertwined threads of plot and theme. The stories are told by the forty-three-year-old writer O’Brien, recalling and...