Conditioned Response: David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel

CONDITIONED RESPONSE: DAVID RABE'S THE BASIC TRAINING OF PAVLO HUMMEL Jeffe,y w:Ferm David Rabe's "Vietnam Trilogy," comprising The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummell (1968), Streamers (1976), and Sticks and Bones (1969), exemplifies many of the recurring themes and motifs that came not only to characterize, but virtually to define, the genre of drama that emerged from the Vietnam War. This genre of dramatic literature constantly and consistently reflects the stresses, anxieties and tensions that shattered the social equilibrium of the America of the 1960s, and focusses on the consequences of these stresses for both the individual and his society. The events of the period fractured American society in a manner unknown since the Civil War, and the stresses associated with the Vietnam conflict exacerbated the social, political and intellectual divisiveness which characterized this period of American history. The individual and collective psychological trauma of American society has been characteristically interpreted by American playwrights in expressionistic dramas which have featured central dramatic metaphors of fragmentation and disintegration. This expressionism has reflected the rupturing of equanimity in American society in metaphors that portray the shattering not only of the individual, but also that of the collective consciousness. The principles by which America defined itself and set itself apart from other societies were tested on the battlefields of Vietnam and perceived by friend and foe alike to be flawed. The impotence of America's military-which had at its command the latest in war technology--became increasingly apparent; there was an evident failure of America's idealism--its values, ethics and mores--in the disastrous attempt to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people; there was the war on the home front where war protesters took to the streets and engaged the authorities on American soil. All these events challenged the validity of the very essence of what America professed to be and to stand for. 158 Jeffery W. Fenn This cultural catastrophe resulted in a breakdown of the mythic underpinning of American ideological, technical and social supremacy, and the subsequent disillusionment triggered a crisis of identity and purpose both in the individual and in the larger community. The assault on the individual and collective American psyche becan1e manifest on the American stage in dramas illustrating individual isolation and alienation concomitant with a loss of cultural and social identity. Consequently, the genre of Vietnam dramatic literature can be characterized and defined in the struggle of an individual attempting to gain or to regain, to define or to redefine, to assert or to reassert, his essential and rightful place in a cultural construct. This struggle constitutes the definitive motif in Rabe's Vietnam trilogy. Hummel and Streamers are plays of initiation which depict recruits being incorporated into a new cultural environment--that of the military society; Sticks and Bones is a play of attempted re-integration in which a soldier, alienated from his society by his extra-cultural experience in Vietnam, undertakes to reconstruct and redefine his former relationship with his family. In all three plays, the protagonists inevitably fail in their conception, definition or redefinition of their place in American society, and their attempts at integration or re-integration into the social order. The definitive motif underlying the plot, structure and action of Rabe's trilogy follows that outlined in anthropologist Arnold van Gennep's "rites of passage." Rabe structures his dramas on the ritual associated with the tripartite pattern of separation, experience and re-integration; he documents the stresses on an individual who undergoes the transitional stage of induction into the army, the extra-cultural exposure overseas; and the attempts at re-integration into a society from which he has been alienated as a consequence of his military training and war experience. The major thematic thrusts and the dramatic impact of Rabe's trilogy are worked through the examination of the consequences for the individual when the cultural signifiers which formulate his consciousness are re-conformed in the military structure. The play's focus on the effects of the demands of the psychological re-programming necessary for the implementation of the new social order of the military, the trauma of extra-cultural experience, and the problems...