The song that gives Richard Vergette’s play its name—it has previously been seen in Salford, Edinburgh and London as simply Leaving Vietnam—is played as the audience enters in its slow version that gives the title less prominence, reworked by Springsteen after a number of right-wing politicians from Reagan onwards have mistaken it for tub-thumping nationalism as they haven’t listened to the verses.
Like the song, the play looks at the plight of Vietnam veterans who returned home to embarrassment rather than glory and to a country that failed to look after either their mental health or their economic stability. Vergette is Jimmy Vandenburg, known as ‘Dutch’ in the Marines, who signed up before the draft and was sent to the DMZ, the demilitarised zone, which was anything but.
He was looked after and often restrained from his worst impulses by his friend Alvarado, a medic, until he was killed by a Vietcong bomb in front of Jimmy’s eyes. Returning home, his grandmother told him the the war he had been fighting was not an ‘honourable’ one and his girlfriend Bernice had moved on to someone else, although she later returned and they were married.
He lost his job at the Ford factory when it closed, and we see him now in his own workshop, fixing classic cars for rich men who don’t mind or don’t notice when he overcharges them. But he has still not dealt with his feelings of rejection by his country, and when the red MAGA hat comes out, it looks like he has fallen for the populist politician’s arguments that seem to offer so many easy answers until—or unless—you scratch beneath the surface. This drives a rift between him and his wife and daughter.
However, this is far from the conclusion of the piece. One day, a dead man walked in—this is a line he starts with but which isn’t explained until later. It’s Alvarado’s son, who wants him to go with him to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC to see his father’s name. Jimmy has avoided going there before, but he agrees, creating a moving and hopeful ending.
There is a lot of well-researched historical detail that decorates a tightly plotted, very personal story of an essentially decent man who has been led on a certain path through bitterness, neglect by his country and perhaps also some lingering, undiagnosed PTSD.
The performance is well-paced and Vergette is a compelling storyteller, convincing in the role of this decorated war veteran and blue collar worker who concludes, “to put a man in uniform and make him wonder what it was all for is to spit on him.”