Living with Defeat

By T.E. Kalem

MEDAL OF HONOR RAG by Tom Cole

Lost wars haunt people. In some ways the South is still haunted by the Civil War. Hitler might never have come to power but for the fact that the Germans were defeated in World War I. The U.S. never lost a war before Viet Nam, and, undeclared though it was, most Americans are so haunted by it that they have wiped an eraser across the blackboard of their minds.

Occasionally a playwright comes along to chalk up the score all over again. David Rabe did it with visceral force in Sticks and Bones, a play in which the hero is at peace only with the skeletons who stalk his mind. Medal of Honor Rag is a slighter drama argued like a legal brief rather than felt like a wound.

In his first play, Tom Cole, 43, who has written short stories and a novel (An End to Chivalry), argues that it is incalculably cynical for a society to reward a man with the Congressional Medal of Honor for doing what it has taught him was evil and abhorrent --murdering other human beings. Cole's medal winner, Dale Jackson (Howard E. Rollins Jr.), a black Viet Nam hero, has cracked up. A psychiatrist (David Clennon) tries to rid Jackson of his survival guilt complex. Why did he live and his buddies die? The notion that survival can be worse than death is probably the weakest proposition in the play. However, the two principals are admirable. Wary, arrogant, streetwise, tormented, Rollins' Jackson makes demands on every playgoer's conscience, and David Clennon's firm, troubled, incisively probing psychiatrist merits a call from the producers of Equus whenever Richard Burton leaves that strikingly similar role.

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