It was 1980. The Vietnam War had been over for five years. There was a growing movement among its Veterans, who were angry, isolated and disenfranchised. They were beginning to demand the services and acknowledgment they deserved.  

I received a call that spring from John Difusco, a fellow Vietnam Veteran, who was looking for rehearsal space for a new Vietnam War play.  It was to be a collaboration between him and seven other Vets, who were going to write the play through a series of workshops. It would be based on their experiences in Vietnam and coming home after the war. 

I had never met John and did not know anything about him, but he was a Veteran looking to do something to help other Veterans.  I called around and got him a space in an unused cafeteria on a VA campus, got busy with other things, and promptly forgot about it. 

A couple of months later, John called to invite me to the opening night of the play he and the other men had created.  What I saw that night was Tracers, one of the truest and most compelling tellings of the Vietnam soldier’s experience that I had ever seen, and that I have ever seen since.   Its debut coincided with the growing discontent among Vietnam Vets who had been treated so poorly by the American public and government. Veterans had begun gathering on the lawn of the Los Angeles Veterans Administration building in a hunger strike.  Other protests were taking place around the country. Later that summer, congress would authorize three acres near the Lincoln Memorial for what would become the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

I brought more and more Vets to performances of the play.  It was a cathartic experience for them to see these stories, so similar to their own, being acted out on stage.   

Tracers, directed by John and performed the Veterans who wrote it, went on to become a hugely successfully play.  After its initial run, it played at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and was directed by Garry Sinise.  It then went to New York, where there was a huge prejudice against Los Angeles-based theater.  The play, directed there by John, not only survived, but thrived.

Newsweek called it, "a land mine of a play that blows complacency to shreds,” and it was published in Otis Gurney’s Ten Best Plays of 1984/85.

By the time the play came back to Los Angeles, it was 1985.  John held the first of what would be several benefit performances of Tracers in support of the National Veterans Foundation.   The play lives on today and is produced by a number of groups every year. 

This past Veterans Day, a production of Tracers was performed in Los Angeles at the Elephant Theatre by a group of young men and women who wanted to do something in honor of our Vets.   

It continues to be a work that taps into the internal chaos, anger and isolation that many Vietnam Vets felt, and still feel to some extent.  And those are feelings that resonate with many of today’s Veterans.  At the performance on Wednesday, a young former soldier who had spent time Iraq got up and left during a particularly intense scene.

When you talk to John, he will tell you that this is something that happened in the eighties and nineties with many Vietnam Veterans.  The post-traumatic stress themes dealt with in the play are ones that that are common to all combat Veterans.  The scenes of soldiers in barracks, the camaraderie, the boredom, the homesickness, those are also themes that all soldiers can connect with.  John says that the performances are healing events for combat Veterans, and for someone who has seen it with other Veterans many times over the years, I can attest to that.   The "New Vets" that viewed the play on Veterans Day related to it regardless of the era in which they served.

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TRACERS, written by the original cast of Vincent Caristi, Richard Chaves, John DiFusco, Eric E. Emerson, Rick Gallavan, Merlin Marston and Harry Stephens with Sheldon Lettich; conceived and directed by John DiFusco.