Touching tales, haunting torment of war

After the drill sergeant torments and taunts his soon-to-be soldiers, men he calls ''maggot'' and ''it,'' he steps back for a steely-eyed reality check.

Half of these 18- and 19-year-old Americans, soon to ship out for Vietnam, will be wounded or dead by the age of 21. Just 10 percent will be good fighters; only 1 in 100 will be, the sergeant says, a ''warrior.'' Fully 80 percent of these men, men about to be pounded by the tidal waves of war, will be something else.

''Targets,'' the sergeant says.

Tracers, a 1980 play written by John DiFusco and seven other Vietnam veterans, gets inside the experience of war with harrowing, sobering, black-comic authenticity. At Artemis Performance Space 742 in Little Havana, Miami's Juggerknot Theatre Company has mounted a timely in-your-face revival of the piece, first done here in 1989 by the ferocious, now-defunct Acme Acting Company.

A collage of drama and oral history, Tracers is both quite specifically about its soldiers' lives before, during and after Vietnam and about the experiences that men (and now women) in combat still face: the horror of war, mangled bodies, facing or causing death. Resisting temptation or surrendering to it. Coming home forever altered, or not coming home, except to be buried.

Tracers is not, understand, easy to watch or to take in. Like the Vietnam War itself, the play can be messy, confusing, vile and disturbing.

Shoehorned by director Andy Quiroga and the Juggerknot cast into Artemis' narrow black-box space, Tracers often unfolds in the middle of the audience, which is jammed against the walls. When the soldier-actors are on ''patrol,'' they -- and their guns -- can be inches away from your face.

The intimacy of the space also amps up the intensity of the sergeant-''maggot'' scene and many others.

When crazy Dinky Dau (Andrio Chavarro) shoots and blisses out on heroin, you cringe. When Dinky Dau and Scooter (Steve Russo) start to pummel each other, you duck. When the men suggest the stench and horror of collecting their fallen comrades' bodies, you recoil.

Some of the scenes are funny-foul, as when the gung-ho Little John (Derek Warriner) spews a monologue in which nearly every other word is ``f - - -.''

Others are touching: A loner-soldier dubbed ''Professor'' (David Perez-Ribada) finds a kindred spirit in a medic called Doc (Russell Kerr) when the two discover a common fondness for Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf and other things intellectual.

Still others underscore how enduring the play's themes are: Habu (Kristoff Sklet), who re-enlists and becomes a ''lifer'' after Vietnam, describes subsequent combat in Lebanon as `` . . . the unwilling being led by the uneducated to do the impossible for the ungrateful.''

Juggerknot's ensemble cast, which also includes Seth Maisel as a young soldier dubbed Baby San and Gregg Weiner as the sergeant, is solid in its service of the drawn-from-life script.

Like DiFusco and the others who lived to tell their Vietnam stories, they vividly remind us that war is hell.

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.