David Rabe's "Streamers" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

David Rabe (March 10, 1940) is an American military veteran, playwright and screenwriter who first came to national prominence with the performance of his 1969 play "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," the first of his four plays thematically linked together as the Vietnam Plays. "Pavlor Hummel" focuses on the violence and barbarity of both the Viet Cong and the American troops forced to go to war. The second, "Sticks and Bones," is the story of a blinded veteran who returns to America from the war and commits suicide. "Streamers," the subject of this post, was the third. The final Vietnam play is "The Orphan," an adaptation of the Oresteia that combines elements of the Greek trilogy, the Manson family murders, and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1970s. "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel" was awarded the Tony Award for its Broadway premiere.

Tim O'Brien is a American military veteran, acclaimed author of novels (his work Going After Cacciato was awarded the National Book Award in 1979) and short stories (his 1990 collection The Things They Carried, from which today's short story "How To Tell A True War Story" is pulled), and professor. O'Brien, like Rabe, chooses the military as the backdrop for his fictions. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien treads the line between fiction and non-fiction; the stories rely upon metanarrative techniques (the author and the narrator share the same name), temporal shifts to points of time before, after, and during Vietnam,  and the like to create a multivalent and polyvocal account of soldiers who fought and died for their country.

Discussion Questions: The Things They Carried 

1. For O'Brien, what are the characteristics of a "true" war story?

2. In the second section of O'Brien's story, he notes that

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. 

This is not a new critique; one can see something similar in the poetry of Wilfred Owen (in particular, his poem "Dulce et decorum est"), the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, and numerous other writers. Owen, like O'Brien, adopts a critical tone when he notes:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you agree with these writers that a true war story cannot be moral? That the idea of a just war is simply a fantasy that obscures or masks the graves of those who died for their countries, and that nothing justifies the deaths of young men?

3. Much is made by O'Brien between appearance and reality; in fact, he says, it's in the space or lacunae of memory that actual truth can be found. He claims the following:

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. [...] The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

Is it fair to say that, for O'Brien, fiction is more true than documentary? If truth does not lie in empirical fact or the exact happening of an event, then where can we find it in war literature?

4. What is the point of the murder of the baby water buffalo? What does it add to O'Brien's story.

5. Speaking personally, I am the son of a Vietnam veteran. My father lost his leg in combat during Vietnam. He was a marksman; when I was little, I asked him if he ever killed anyone, and he paused for a second before saying "Yeah" in a way that made me convinced that he killed a lot of people while over there. I can speak from experience that something about that war broke him, or changed something inside of him. He doesn't talk about his feelings, or share them. And he never talks about Vietnam, ever.

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?

Do you think this might account for the reason why a veteran might not speak about Vietnam?

Discussion Questions: Streamers

1. Why is Richie's sexuality so important at the beginning of the play?

2. Every monologue in a play, if the play is a good one, can be seen to be a microcosm of the play as a whole -- the plot writ small, so to speak. If that's true of Streamers, how do you think Cokes' monologue from pp. 32-4 relates to the rest of the play?

3. Streamers strikes me as a play written in the style of realism; Rabe's subsequent play, The Orphan, is decidedly anti-realist. Suppose that you were part of the production team for Streamers and the play's director wanted to embrace avant-garde stagings (including, but not limited to: minimalist set; non-Stanislavsky-based acting; specific design techniques taken from early-to-mid Twentieth Century avant-garde movements such as symbolism, surrealism, expressionism, and so on). What sorts of techniques could you use while retaining Rabe's argument/theme?

4. What would you say is Rabe's argument in Streamers? Is it any good?

5. Do you think that this play would work outside the context of Vietnam literature? Could this play be staged successfully today? Why or why not?