Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(28)

I talked to my brother-in-law Mac about what he thought about our putting on the play. He liked the idea and informed me about certain details I needed to make sure I got right. More than anything, I wanted him to come see the play. But in August 1983, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Mac’s manual for the army was published in October 1983, and that same month his promising career and life were cut short. He passed away at age thirty-nine, leaving behind his wife, Anne, and three-year-old daughter, Katie. The eulogy at his funeral in Pontiac, Illinois, was given by a dear friend of Mac’s who had also served in Vietnam. I had never been to a military funeral before. It was very somber. There was the honor guard. The flag-draped coffin. The twenty-one-gun salute. I have never forgotten it. Mac was laid to rest beside his father in the cemetery across the street from where he grew up. Lieutenant Colonel Boyd McCanna “Mac” Harris had truly lived a life of service to others, and his passing only put the cap on my commitment to do the play right. I wanted Tracers to honor Vietnam veterans such as Mac Harris and help tell their stories.

Something else happened in the month of October that also strengthened my commitment to tell the stories of our service members. President Reagan had sent a peacekeeping force to Beirut, Lebanon. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck into the building that was used as a barracks for our service members, killing 220 marines, eighteen sailors, and three soldiers. I saw television reports about that horror a month before I was going to start work on Tracers. I had already assembled my cast, and I got calls from several members, asking if I’d heard about the devastating attack on our troops. It was a terrible day, and it reinforced my desire to honor our veterans with a great production.

Five weeks before we started rehearsals for Tracers, I gathered the ensemble to begin diving into the preparatory work. I knew we couldn’t do this play in any kind of half-hearted way. We had to fully empathize with and care about the content of this play, about what the veterans truly went through.

As a cast, we read books about Vietnam and discussed what we’d read. A thirteen-part series called Vietnam: A Television History aired on PBS, so we watched it together as a cast. We took Tai Chi classes to get physically fit. We traveled an hour outside of Chicago to meet with veterans who taught us about firearms, which we then fired so we understood what a loaded rifle felt like in our hands. On a few occasions, we visited the North Chicago Veterans Administration near Naval Station Great Lakes to meet with a group of Vietnam veterans, patients at the VA, who were struggling with post-traumatic stress, undergoing any number of challenges because of their service. As we sat with them, they told us about what they’d done and seen, and they spoke very openly. They shared their stories with us, their heartache and their pain. They shared the horror of seeing their friends die in combat, and the horror of coming back to an America that had rejected them and often treated them as pariahs. Many of the vets told us it was healing for them to talk. For us, it reaffirmed our commitment to get things right.

One of the final things we did in preparation for the play was head to a summer camp that was closed for the winter in the small town of Sawyer, Michigan. A staff member at Steppenwolf had a connection there and was able to arrange for us to use it. I wanted to create a “boot camp” experience for the cast, and we were able to sequester ourselves as an ensemble for six days, out in the middle of nowhere, to focus completely on building our platoon. As it was dead of winter, the camp was frozen, knee-deep in snow, and it would be tough on the cast, doing all that training outside. But it was going to be a great ensemble-building exercise, and as director I was going to do everything that I required the actors to do.

I asked Dennis Farina (who later became known for playing Ray “Bones” Barboni in Get Shorty) to be our drill instructor at the camp. He was also going to play Sergeant Williams, the drill instructor in the play. Before becoming an actor, Dennis had served in the army for three years and done a tour in Vietnam, and later served for eighteen years in the Chicago Police Department, burglary division. The toughest of the tough, Dennis woke us up at three o’clock every morning by banging garbage can lids. He ordered us outside to do push-ups and jumping jacks in the snow until we thought we’d pass out. We wore our fatigues everywhere and went on long hikes and marches in the snow. For most of that week, Dennis did his best to make our lives a living hell. Just what I wanted.

We were fortunate to have two actual Vietnam veterans in our cast: Dennis and a fabulous African American actor named Greg Williams. On our final day at the camp, New Year’s Eve 1983, we hosted war games. One of the ensemble members, Gary Cole (later known for his role as Bill Lumbergh, the nightmarish boss in Office Space), became our enemy. He donned white camo, hiked into the wilderness, and hid in the snowy forest, and we needed to hunt him down. We tried to simulate the quietness we’d need to maintain in the forest, not knowing where the enemy was hiding. Instead of paintball guns, we carried model rifles that looked like real M16s and little bags of flour. If we saw the enemy, we were to throw a bag of flour at him. Two of our guys became lost and wandered too close to a neighbor’s house. The owner ran out, alarmed, and demanded to know why our guys were sneaking around in the snow, carrying rifles. He phoned the sheriff, who came quickly, and I explained (somewhat frantically) that the guns were fake and this was just play practice. Eventually it all got straightened out.

On the last night of the camp we threw a party, one over-the-top New Year’s Eve bash. All the guys went a little bonkers after a week in the snow. Next morning we ate breakfast, did a workout, then read the play for the first time. This was the first time the cast had even picked up the script, and the first reading crackled with energy. It was awesome to hear it come alive. Our platoon was ready, and as a director I was ready. We headed back to Chicago, and for the next four weeks we rehearsed the play, my cast ever-investing themselves in the lives of these characters. Then we opened the doors to the show.