An early scene

Here is an excerpt from an every version of the play which has since been cut. It is the dramatization of a story my boss likes to tell about his time in Vietnam:

Jeff: Go where you are needed, hu? ‘Till they don’t need you know more. Then they throw you right out on the street. Ain’t that how it is?

Omar: Ain’t that how it was?

Jeff: How it was. We served, Uncle Sam, two years in ‘dat jungle, you an me. In Vietnam. Remember that night? Rain’in. All I wanted was a hot meal.

Omar: Jus a hot meal.

Jeff: So I take my helmet, and I pour in a can of soup. And I try to light a fire. But everything is all wet. Soaked to the bone.

Omar: To the bone.

Jeff: So one guy in our platoon takes out the plastic explosive and pulls off a piece, a little tab like, the size of a dime. And he puts in on the ground and lights it up. And damn, like a roman candle that thing lights up. Hot soup- faser den a microwave! I pull my helmet off, but iz still burning, steady and bright, and I say, ‘You fool, you’ll give away our position’ and I step on it with my boot. And it burns a whole straight my boot, straight through my foot, straight up out the other side. And I get sent back the States. With noth’in. I get nothing. Because I ‘damaged government property.’ You in the military, your body is government property. Your body doesn’t even belong to you. How can you not own your own body?

Omar: I don no. I juz don’ know. (they exit)