Easing the conscience

...He remembers, with a little help from Stone, that he once stood at an open window and contemplated Commonweal: 404...

...Did he have a "special girl...

...The one thing we know for certain is that they were all victims, and this is what we should remember on Memorial Day...

...To the extent that he linked both the honor and the unknown's sacrifice, by none too subtle implication, to his administration's increasingly unpopular foreign and military policies, his speech demeaned both...

...It has received both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Tony as the best new play of 1983-84...

...Commonweal: 402 It is a relatively small step from there to the logical and moral absurdity of regarding all who died in all of history's wars, no matter how unjust, as heroes worthy of undying gratitude and reverence...

...And it is sad to think that many who invoked him twenty years ago have relinquished their hold on him at a time when he is needed more than ever...

...It is equally wrong to ignore the fact that some who did not return dishonored themselves and their nation by their behavior...

...It was because I did not want to be alone...

...From the nation's capital came the coverage of the super- extravaganza surrounding the internment at Arlington of the Vietnam War's Unknown Soldier...

...We can never give back what we have taken from them, but we owe them a more honorable legacy, a legacy of peace and justice, This is why we must not lose our will to search for the truth, to remember the truth, and to act upon the truth...

...There is no reason why Henry's speech cannot be true and he, as playwright, an inadequate illustration of it, but the play as a whole seems to insist that a way with words is not enough...

...Some of those interviewed on television made the point that it makes no difference what kind of war it was...

...We can guess at some of them -- it is most likely, for instance, that the man selected for the honor had been poor and black and barely out of high school...

...just being there and obey- ing orders was enough to merit uncritical approval and praise...

...A buddy was still on fire and I carried, I crawled with him twenty-five feet...

...Michael Trent, Kopit's playwright, has decided that a dramatist is a kind of detective who must ferret out the secret in any situa- tion...

...Chances are that, like "Eddie" and most of his comrades, this young man would have been counting the days until his release from a thoroughly hellish experience, quite unprepared for the earlier release that caught him unawares...

...It may ease the conscience and serve the Reagan administration's political objectives to declare him a hero, but there is no conceivable way to support that assumption...

...We should at least spare him, whoever and whatever he was, the indignity of exploiting what little was left of him as a propaganda device for glamorizing war and the military...

...The opening scene --Henry's play --is a brittle, Noel-Cowardish exercise in coping with infidelity which is supposed to reflect the playwright's lack of feeling, but the scene in which Annie's husband learns of her affair with Henry is just as comily theatrical, although presumably it is to show the pain of the real thing...

...Besides, it might have been too depressing...

...For all anyone knows, he may have died in panic cowering helplessly in some shelter that proved less secure than he hoped...

...Organizers, remembering the heady days of mass demonstrations on the Common, had hoped for more...

...I I k VIETNAM--A MEMORIAL DAY POSTSCRIPT Easing the conscience GORDON C. ZAHN A S CEREMONIES GO, it was modest in scale...

...It is a perversion of the very notion of honor for the president or anyone else to reduce it to a matter of simply being "on the scene" and dying...

...Perhaps he was a Catholic who had come to realize the war was unjust and the killing immoral but who lacked the courage to refuse to continue with what had become for him mortally sinful behavior...

...dying unknown deepens the tragedy immeasurably...

...yet, the idea provides a workable analogy for the artistic process and, more important, gives ideational and emotional direction to the work...

...Saying it may be offensive to some, but it must be said: many who fought and died were guilty of perpetrating acts of extreme brutality which should insure Vietnam a high place in the record of this nation's most inglorious moments...

...Reagan's "hero"died a moral coward, we should also know that, if this was the case, much of the blame should be borne by the chaplains, the religion teachers, the parish priests, and bishops who failed to provide him with the spiritual guidance and support he would need...

...The impressive procession, the ritual gun salutes, and the usual assemblage of dignitaries provided President Reagan with the setting for his almost classic oration filled with hyper-patriotic platitudes such as school children of his (and my) generation were called upon to recite in more innocent days when it was still possible to believe in the glamour and glories of war...

...The evening news telecasts featured clips and interviews from several of the more emotion-filled celebrations...

...As a pacifist, I did my best to oppose their, and the nation's, involvement in that thoroughly discredited conflict...

...However many evidences of true battlefield heroism the record of Vietnam contains, one must include others deserving of that title...

...Politicians and clergymen vied with each other in impassioned patriotic eulogies...

...Most important of all, how did he feel about being there...

...In a very real sense it obliterates a human existence completely...

...There are heroes among us today...

...His friends, do they occasionally think of him...

...No one knows about the subject of the president's gushing romanticism...

...What does seem to be catching on, however, is an attitude of retroactive indifference...

...Perhaps we should focus our Memorial Day ceremonies on the Peace Corps workers, religious lay volunteers, and all the other courageous servants of the poor in the ghettos of our major cities, the rural slums of Appalachia, and the teeming 13 July 1984:403 barrios of the third world...

...Despite the witty lines, the play is essentially sentimental, which may be why it is so popular, and it ends on a lightly, lubriciously happy note that seems benignly fake to me...

...Young men and women are offering years of their lives in service to the victims of an unjust social order here at home and elsewhere in the world, the unjust order Mr...

...I prefer Stoppard in a less cozy play like Night and Day...

...There are so many things one would like to know about every unknown soldier, not only the few chosen at random for enshrinement...

...I somehow neglected to write a review of it when it opened, but now that Broadway has received another drama about a playwright's problems --Arthur Kopit's knobby, demanding, unhouse- broken End of the World --perhaps some comment on the successful Stoppard is an appropriate approach to the much more interesting Kopit play, which was certainly not received with open arms...

...All who fought and certainly all who died in Vietnam deserve to be remembered and, yes, honored by the nation responsible for their being sent there...

...GORDON C. ZAHN...

...Everyone in the village would deny the enemy was there and then maybe you'd just kill somebody...

...By now he is reprinted and invoked more by the Catholic right than by the post-conciliar mainstream...

...but I am sure they would insist that whatever honor we pay them must be shared with thousands of others who perished for speaking out against the oppressors and persecutors our nation supports...

...His diffi- culty in dramatizing such a subject becomes his conceit, and the play is about a playwright commissioned to write a play about the end of the world who finally decides the only way to do so is to write a play about a playwright who...

...Once again, those who went to Vietnam, and especially those who died, deserve to be remembered...

...It is about the prospect of nuclear annihilation...

...Some have to do with the accidentals that meant so much when he was alive but which we now see as being of little or no consequence: race, ethnic descent, religion, economic and social status...

...I have difficulty sorting out Henry's and Stoppard's clichts, for everyone with the possible exception of Annie (thanks in part to Glenn Close's perform- ance) is a stereotype...

...The first, the result of Trent's Washington investigation, is that everyone involved in the numbers game, the scenario juggling of deterrence, knows that the system does not work but does not believe what he knows...

...g VERY DEATH in war is a personal tragedy...

...I was gonna kill 'em out of fear...

...At most we numbered a dozen (not counting the patient dog) stand- ing in the rain across the street from Boston's downtown recruiting offices...

...If it is shocking to suggest that Mr...

...Perhaps a drop-out...

...That magnificent memorial listing their names in the thousands upon thousands is a deeply moving experience for all who have made the pilgrimage to it...

...Henry, Stoppard's playwright, has a speech on words that has been much quoted, out of context, since the play opened...

...The second secret Trent finds within himself...

...Worse still, he might have met death burdened with guilt for some of the atrocities that had become almost commonplace, that "spur of the moment thing" --this is "Eddie" again --"where they had just killed someone who was close to you...

...Bands and uniformed veterans paraded...

...When Philip Stone, the millionaire who wants a play written that will expose and perhaps inhibit the impending doom, hires Trent, he tells him only that Trent must find out on his own what Stone knows and that he has been chosen because he recognizes evil...

...Monuments were unveiled...

...To raise these questions and suggest these possibilities is not to deny that there were authentic heroes, even in Vietnam, and that this unknown soldier may have been one of them...

...Stage PLAYWRIGHT'S DILEMMA STOPPARD & KOPIT T OM STOPPARD'S The Real Thing has become the pseudo-serious hit of the season...

...Speaking of those who died, we said: Some of them went unwillingly, but had no choice because of their economic status...

...Reagan included a few of the questions to be asked in his eulogy...

...This defense of the writer as professional, which may well be Stoppard's point of view, is answered by Annie, who pulls a page from his typewriter and reads a fragment of jargon from a sci-fi filmscript...

...The Real Thing is neat and amiable and a touch banal...

...When feeling particularly thwarted, Newman said that it was Oxford that had made him a Catholic, not a series of scholastic arguments...

...The unknown dead deserve their more preten- tious memorial, too...

...a long-time peace activist, is national director of Pax Christi USA Center on Conscience and War...

...l l The crowning event --one which gave the president full opportunity to display the professional actor's power to ma- nipulate audience emotions --was his awarding of the na- tion's highest tribute, the Congressional Medal of Honor, to the forever anonymous remains...

...It had nothin to do with heroism...

...Only a few passersby bothered to take the flyers we offered them, but those who did would have found our answer to what was taking place in Washington and in so many neighborhoods in Boston...

...It is a scandal that the war's unpopularity carried over to the men returning from hellish tours of duty, making them the objects of scorn and resentment...

...I don't believe in heroes...

...Until then Vietnam will never be over...

...In the course of the play, in which he leaves Charlotte for Annie, he learns to love, to be jealous, to compromise, to recognize that the world is not as neat as a properly-worded construct might make it seem...

...The bitter controversy over the con- tinuing effects of Agent Orange (and its less than satisfactory settlement) testifies to the government's reluctance to accept and meet its responsibilities to them...

...Replacements for the stars are ready in the wings since a long run is predicted, and road-company cities can expect a version of it next season...

...Some of them, we must never forget, gave their lives in sacrifice...

...There are two secrets to be uncovered...

...If one adds, as I must, that there are even greater unmet responsibilities toward the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and our other indis- criminate weapons and strategies, this does not lessen the concern for veterans" rights...

...His religion means nothing to us now, but what did it mean to him then...

...Everybody else was dead and I was sittin' there cryin...

...T HE QUALITYof heroism is rare and often encountered in most unlikely times and places...

...Trapped much tOo early to endure the horrors of a jungle war, he died unknown and probably alone...

...Elsewhere in Boston the turnouts were more impressive...

...The president's attempt at revisionist history is not likely to gain wide acceptance...

...Victims not only of the blow or bullet that ended their lives but, in a more profound sense, victims of the human weaknesses and failings which produce the hatreds and fears which lead to war...

...We may hope this is the case, but we shall never know for certain...

...But those black marble slabs and the gleaming white tomb should be seen as commemorating not heroes but victims...

...Some were both, but most were not...

...My friend, Maura Clarke, and her three martyred companions died as heroes...

...Such sentimentalized at- tribution of higher motive would have been hooted down by this unknown soldier and his more fortunate buddies...

...But I was a coward...

...His books include War, Conscience, and Dissent and Another Part of the War (Univer-sity of Massachusetts...

...We paltry few could not match the others in color, number, or enthusiasm...

...This is what the few who gathered in the Boston rain to name the dead were trying to say...

...What family circle is broken and deprived of even that small comfort of knowing his fate...

...I told one reporter the truth and he didn't believe me...

...It was wrong and cruel to stigmatize all returning veterans for those acts...

...The Oxford Movement, a Catholic revival in a Protestant culture which arose outside Roman control and later engaged in criti- cal dialogue with the magisterium from within and without the Roman communion, may be the greatest single example of that kind of Providence...

...God's truth is liberally distributed in the world for those who want to find it, he seemed to mean, and is the same truth within or without official church channels...

...but the station whose crew had covered our similar gathering made no mention of it...

...Myra MacPher- son's "'Eddie" --in the June 1984 Progressive --spells it out: I knew I was gettin out of there --if 1 had to kill every one of era...

...They felt so guilty about us being there, they gave medals out tike candy...

...Young men (women, too, and priests and nuns) proved their heroism by going to prison or enduring private and public indignities --"saving the day," morally speaking, by their protests...

...others went willingly, thinking that their efforts were on behalfof their country, on behalf of Vietnam, and this faith was betrayed...

...But then much in the play does...

...Offensive as the suggestion most certainly would be to the president, some of the heroes in uniform were those who accepted punishment and exile for refusal to take further part in the slaughter...

...The Real Thing is more about the personal than the profes- sional education of Henry...

...Everybody come home iookin' like Georgie Patton...

...Let this not be misinterpreted...

...Kopit's play, like Stoppard's, is not really about play-writ- ing...

...Good intentions or deep convictions are not enough to fuel a play, Henry says (more elegantly...

...The really important ones, though, were ignored...

...The same logic, it is well to note, was used to justify honoring those who served in Hitler's armed forces in World War II...

...Heroism is not limited to wartime...

...Now that it is over (at least in its active phase) it is a failure in national integrity not to do everything possible to adequately compen- sate its veterans for the physical and psychological trauma they suffered and in many cases must still endure...

...They knew they were there because they had been drafted in most cases, and it would not have taken them long to realize they were paying the price for the stupidities and arrogance of men much older (and presumably wiser) than they...

...art brings small changes in the world --in so far as it brings any at all -- because precise use of language, properly arranged, can form something sub- stantial...

...Eddie" was a volunteer...

...It is difficult not to think that the right misunderstands him in important ways...

...It should not be reduced to the wearing of a uniform...

...Surely where 100,O00 had rallied against their being sent off in the first place, a few hundred could have gathered for the solemn reading of names of the two thousand or so Massachusetts men killed in action in Vietnam...

...His obsession gives the play its frame, a parody private- eye narrative that is less amusing than Kopit hopes...

...They wanted to write what a big hero I was...

...A justifi- able editorial judgment, no doubt...

...The president's glowing assumption that he was witnessing to the "spirit of freedom" and all the other banalities of his address are almost certainly false...

...What youthful hopes and aspirations were so cruelly can- celed in one terrifying instant...

...Reagan and his administration seem determined to preserve at any cost...