by James Reston
you can’t understand what hate means.
I mean I’m a . . . I was a Catholic.
And Catholics have every right to hate like they do.
It requires a whole lifetime
to undo what that training does to them.
MARK: It’s getting hard to talk.
Obviously, I need to tell it,
but I don’t want to be seen as . . .
a monster.
NADINE:Just start talking to Catholics
who allow themselves to talk.
It’s unspeakable what’s been done to Catholic youths.
Every aspect of their life from their table manners
to their sexuality. It’s just terrible.
MARK: I’m just moving through society now.
Pause.
VIII
NADINE:I mean my definition of sophistication
is the inability to be surprised by anything.
MARK: I look at my face in a mirror,
I look at my hand, and I cannot believe . . .
I did these things.
CHERYL:Mark’s hit me before.
MARK: See, I see the war now through my wife.
She’s a casualty too.
She doesn’t get benefits for combat duties.
The war busted me up, I busted up my wife . . .
CHERYL:He’s hit me more than once.
MARK: I mean I’ve hit my wife.
NADINE:Have you ever been drunk for a long period of time?
MARK: But I was always drunk.
NADINE:Well, I have.
MARK: We were always drunk.
It would boil out,
the anger,
when we were drunk.
NADINE:I used to drink a lot
and did vicious things when I was drunk.
And until you’re there,
you don’t know.
MARK: When I was sober, I found out what I’d done to her.
It was . . . I just couldn’t stop.
CHERYL:I was really into speed—oh, how many years ago?
I’m not good with the past.
I mean Mark knows dates and years.
God I don’t know.
MARK: It’s like . . .
I feel terrible about it.
The last time it happened
it was about a year ago now.
I made up my mind to quit drinking
because drinking’s what’s brought it on.
CHERYL:We got into some kind of argument about speed.
And he pushed me down the stairs.
He hit me a couple of times.
NADINE:Yeah it’s there and it takes years.
My husband I were
grooving on our fights.
I mean really creative.
And five years ago we got down to the count.
Where we were batting each other around.
Okay, I hit my husband. A lot.
See, I’m capable of it.
MARK: I dropped out of AA.
I put the cork in the bottle myself.
NADINE:Okay—I really was drunk, really mad.
And I beat him up and do you know what he said to me?
He turned to me after he took it and he said:
I didn’t know you cared that much.
It was the most incredible thing.
And he stood there and held his face
and took it
and turned around in a state of glory and said:
I didn’t think you cared.
I’ll never hit another person again.
CHERYL:I went to the hospital
’cause my ribs . . .
I think, I don’t know.
I don’t remember it real clearly.
It had something to do with speed.
The fact that I wasn’t, I was,
I wasn’t rational.
No, I must have really tore into him.
I mean I can be nasty.
So anyway that was hard because I couldn’t go to work
for a couple of weeks.
NADINE:And I see Mark.
The fact that he beat his wife.
I understand it.
I don’t like it.
But I understand it.
MARK: I’ve been sober so long now, it’s terrifying.
See, I really got into photography while I was drunk.
Got involved in the art program at the U.
I mean I could be fine
and then the wrong thing would come up
and it would shut me off.
NADINE:Don’t distance yourself from Mark.
MARK: I’d space out and start talking about the war.
See, most of these people
didn’t have to deal with it.
They all dealt with the other side.
NADINE:I was “anti-war,” I marched, I was “non-violent.”
(Laughs)
MARK: I brought some photos.
This is a picture of some people who at one point in time
were in my unit. That is,
they were there at the time the photo was taken.
Some of them are dead, some of them made it home,
(Pause)
some of them are dead now.
NADINE:But I’m capable of it.
MARK: After I was there, I could never move with people
who were against the war in a real way.
It took a part of our life.
I knew what it was and they didn’t.
NADINE:We all are.
MARK: They could get as pissed off as they wanted to
I didn’t fight with them.
I didn’t bitch with them.
I just shut up. Excuse me.
(Looks at audience. Sees or thinks HE sees they’re on the other side. Moment of murderous anger. HE shuts up and exits)
IX
CHERYL:I’m scared knowing that I have to keep my mouth shut.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I mean
I fantasize a lot.
I have to.
I’ve got nothing else to do.
See; I’ve got no real line of communication at all, on this issue.
If I ever told him I was scared for my life, he’d freak out.
If I ever said anything like that, how would he react?
Would he get angry?
What do you think? Do I want to take that chance?
I got too much to lose.
Before, you know, when we were just single together,
I had nothing to lose. I have a little boy here.
And if I ever caught Mark hurting me
or that little boy again, I’d kill him.
And I don’t wanna be up for manslaughter,
Danny means more to me than Mark does.
Only because of what Mark does to me.
He doesn’t realize it maybe, but he squelches me.
God, I’m scared.
I don’t wanna be alone for the rest of my life
with two kids. And I can’t rob my children of what
little father they could have.
NADINE:I’ve always understood
how people could hurt each other
with weapons.
If you’ve been hurt to the quick,
and a weapon’s around, WHAP.
I signed my divorce papers because
last time he came over, I knew if
there’d been a gun around, I’d’ve
killed him.
MARK reenters.
X
MARK: I’m sorry.
I don’t think you understand.
Sure, I was pissed off at myself that I let myself go.
Deep down inside I knew I could have stopped it.
I could just have said:
I won’t do it.
Go back in the rear, just not go out,
let them put me in jail. I could have said:
“I got a toothache,” gotten out of it.
But it was this duty thing.
It was tike:
YOU’RE UNDER ORDERS.
You have your orders, you have your job,
you’ve got to DO it.
Well, it was like crazy.
At night, you could do anything . . .
It was free-fire zones. It was dark, then
all of a sudden, everything would just burn loose.
It was beautiful. . . . You were given all this power to work outside the law.
We all dug it.
But I don’t make any excuses for it.
I may even be trying to do that now.
I could have got out.
Everybody could’ve.
If EVERYBODY had said no,
it couldn’t have happened.
There were times we’d say:
let’s pack up and go, let’s quit.
But jokingly.
We knew we were there.
But I think I knew then
we could have got out of it.
NADINE:Oh,
I’m worried about men.
MARK: See, there was a point, definitely, when I was
genuincly interested in trying to win the war.
It was my own area.
I wanted to do the best I could.
I mean I could have played it really low-key.
I could have avoided things, I could have made sure
we didn’t move where we could have contacts.
NADINE:I worry about them a lot.
MARK: And I watched the younger guys.
Maybe for six weeks there was nothing.
He’d drift in space wondering what he’d do under fire.
It only takes once.
That’s all it takes . . .
and then you dig it.
NADINE:Men are stripped.
MARK: It’s shooting fireworks off, the Fourth of July
NADINE:We took away all their toys . . . their armor.
When I was younger, I’d see a man in uniform
and I’d think:
what a hunk.
Something would thrill in me.
Now we look at a man in uniform—
a Green Beret, a marine—
and we’re embarrassed somehow.
We don’t know who they are anymore.
What’s a man? Where’s the model?
All they had left was being Provider.
And now with the economics, they’re losing it all.
My father is a farmer.
This year, my mother learned to plow.
I talked to my father on the phone the other night and I said:
Hey, Dad, I hear Mom’s learning how to plow.
Well, sure, he said.
She’s been a farmer’s wife for forty, fifty years.
Yes. But she’s just learning to plow now.
And there was a silence
and then he said:
That’s a feminist issue I’d rather not discuss
at the moment.
So. We don’t want them to be the Provider,
because we want to do that ourselves.
We don’t want them to be heroes,
and we don’t want them to be knights in shining armor, John Wayne—
so what’s left for them to be, huh?
Oh, I’m worried about men.
They’re not coming through.
(My husband)
How could I have ever gotten married?
They were programmed to fuck,
now they have to make love.
And they can’t do it.
It all comes down to fucking versus loving.
We don’t like them in the old way anymore.
And I don’t think they like us, much.
Now that’s a war, huh?
End of Act One
ACT TWO
I
MARK: This is the photo I showed you.
Of some guys in my unit.
We were south-southwest of Danang—
we were in that whole triangle, not too far
from where My Lai was.
Near the mountains, near the coast.
Everybody knew about My Lai.
But it wasn’t different from what was going on.
I mean, the grunts did it all the time.
This fellow up there, that’s Michele.
He ended up in the nuthouse,
that’s the fellow I pulled out of the bush.
This is the machine gunner.
The kid was so good
he handled the gun like spraying paint.
This kid was from down South.
Smart kid.
He got hit in the head, with grenade shrapnel.
He’s alive, but he got rapped in the head.
That was the end of the war for him.
NADINE:I don’t know what it is with Mark.
I have a lot of charming friends
that are very quiet, like him—
but they don’t have his power.
CHERYL:You know what Mark’s power is:
He’s got an imagination that just doesn’t quit.
NADINE:It got to be coincidental when we’d been somewhere together
and someone said: You know your friend Mark,
I liked the way he was so quiet.
MARK: There were no two ways about it . . .
CHERYL:He’s got an imagination that, that embarrasses me . . .
MARK: People who were into it really got a chance to know.
CHERYL:Because I am conservative.
MARK: You knew that you were killing something.
You actually knew it, you saw it, you had the body.
You didn’t take wounded. That was it.
You just killed them.
And they did the same to you.
NADINE:(Laughing)
I told him his face is a dangerous weapon.
He ought to be real responsible with it.
CHERYL:All his jars . . .
NADINE:I think we’d only known each other for a week and I said:
You should really have a license for that face.
MARK: (That’s my friend, that’s R.J.)
My friend R.J. used to carry a machete.
I don’t know why he never did it.
But he always wanted to cut somebody’s head off.
NADINE:You know why they went crazy out there?
It’s that totally negative religion.
It makes you fit to kill.
Those commandments . . .
MARK: He wanted to put it on a stick and put it in a village.
NADINE:Every one of them
“Thou shalt not.”
MARK: It was an abuse of the dead.
We got very sacred about taking the dead.
NADINE:Take an infant and start him out on the whole world with
THOU SHALT NOT . . .
and you’re perpetually in a state of guilt
or a state of revolt.
MARK: There’s a whole Buddhist ceremony.
R.J., everybody—got pissed off.
He wanted to let them know.
CHERYL:But he’s got an imagination . . .
MARK: I never saw our guys rape women. I heard about it.
CHERYL:And it’s usually sexually orientated somehow.
MARK: But you never took prisoners, so you’d have to get
involved with them while they were dying
or you’d wait until they were dead.
CHERYL:Everything Mark does is sexually orientated.
MARK: The Vietnamese got into that.
There was this one instance I told you about
where R.J. shot the person in the face . . .
it was a woman.
CHERYL:I don’t know why we got together.
MARK: The Vietnamese carried that body back.
It took them all night long to work that body over.
CHERYL
:When I think back on it, he was weird, off the war.
MARK: It was their spoils.
They could do what they wanted.
NADINE:So you send these guys out there
all their lives they’ve been listening
to nuns and priests
and they start learning to kill.
MARK: (Snaps on picture of him with medal. Full dress)
This is a picture of my first Purple Heart.
NADINE:Sure Mark felt great. I understand that.
His senses were finally alive.
CHERYL:His Purple Hearts never got to me.
I was never impressed with the fighting man,
I don’t think.
MARK: A lot of people bullshitted that war
for a lot of Purple Hearts.
I heard about a guy who was in the rear
who went to a whorehouse.
He got cut up or something like that.
And he didn’t want to pay the woman
or something like that.
He ended up with a Purple Heart.
CHERYL:Well, drugs helped, a lot.
We didn’t have much in common.
MARK: I don’t know. We were out in the bush.
To me, a Purple Heart meant it was something you got
when you were wounded and you bled.
You were hurt during a contact.
I didn’t feel anything getting it.
But I wanted a picture of it.
CHERYL:I mean, I’ve got to get that basement cleaned out.
MARK: Actually, I was pissed off about getting that medal.
CHERYL:My little boy’s getting curious.
MARK: There were South Vietnamese who were sent out with us, fought with us.
CHERYL:He goes down and sees some of that crap down there Mark’s saved . . .
MARK They didn’t really give a shit.
CHERYL:Never throws anything away.
MARK: If things got too hot you could always
count on them running.
Jackasses.
CHERYL:Mark’s a packrat . . .
MARK: (Holds up a belt)
I’m a packrat. I never throw anything away.
This belt is an artifact.
I took it off of somebody I killed.
It’s an NVA belt.
I sent it home. I think it was kind of a trophy.
This is the man’s blood.
That’s a bullet hole.
This particular fellow had a belt of grenades
that were strapped to his belt.
See where the rust marks are?
CHERYL:Everything he’s done,
everything is sexually orientated in some way.
Whether it’s nakedness or violence—it’s all
sexually orientated.
And I don’t know where this comes from.
(MARK searches for more slides)
He can take those slides
and you know where he can put ’em.
Right up his butt.
I mean he’s just,
he’ll go down there
and dig up old slides.
