Watching the Juggerknot Theatre Company's visceral drama Tracers in the P.S. 742 black-box space in Little Havana is a bit like jumping into a foxhole with these Vietnam War grunts.

Director Andy Quiroga scores a bull's-eye with John DiFusco's collection of vignettes, stretching from the first day at boot camp to the return to an ungrateful home after the horrors of being "in country." The eight cast members wrangle with one another in a small playing area with two rows of seats on each side, hemmed in by shiny black walls that figure in lighting designer Eric Nelson's finale. Nelson's lighting work is complemented by Joe Pisciotta's eerie sound effects mix.

There's nothing new in DiFusco's 1985 drama that hasn't been said or shown before, but no movie packs the wallop of an up-close personal confrontation (especially when a few M-16 rifles are pointed at the audience's faces, just inches away). And Tracers does get into the Vietnam War era's particular psyche over the long haul.

The cast of mostly young regional performers includes Kristoff Skalet as the black platoon leader, dedicated to keeping his men alive; Derek Warriner as the gung-ho enlistee, and David Perez-Ribada as the thoughtful loner. Steve Russo and Andrio Chavarro are short-fused disciplinary problems, Seth Maisel is the team nerd (at first), Russell Kerr the medic and Gregg Weiner the drill sergeant.

In every case, the mixture of verbal and flesh-and-blood reality with theatrical imagination heightens the emotional sensations. Tracers is a loud, often angry and frequently unsettling personal portrait of war before, during and the awful after of combat. And for those who partook of that era, memory also comes into play.