Vice And Victims in Viet Nam

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CASUALTIES OF WAR Directed by Brian De Palma; Screenplay by David Rabe

Why are we in Viet Nam? Again. At this late date. In the case of Casualties of War, there can be only one answer: for further diagnostic tests on the national conscience. For the story it tells, based on an incident first reported in The New Yorker by Daniel Lang two decades ago, is too brutally horrific to contemplate unless some moral edification can be derived from it, some guide to the larger enigmas of human conduct.

The story, recounted in a grinding, realistic style that is unlike Brian De Palma's usual manner of playing fast and loose with death, is simple to describe. A small unit under the command of a Sergeant Meserve (Sean Penn, in an uncompromising performance) sets off on a long-range reconnaissance mission. On Meserve's orders, it stops at a peasant village, where it abducts a young girl and sadistically binds and gags her for the many awful hours of their trek. The girl, who is heartbreakingly played by a delicate newcomer named Thuy Thu Le, will serve as "portable R. and R." In other words, Meserve intends that he and his men will gang-rape her. This they eventually do, with only one among them, Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), refusing to participate and trying to rescue the girl. She is murdered in a fire fight, and ultimately Eriksson, despite threats to his own life and the indifference of his commanding officers, succeeds in bringing charges against his sometime buddies. They receive, at last, stern punishment from a court-martial.

Its surface realism notwithstanding, this movie must be read symbolically, especially since it is presented as a dream that overtakes Eriksson years later, when he encounters a young Oriental woman on a train who reminds him of the long-ago victim. In the dream, Meserve -- arrogant, competent, headlong (in short, a born American leader) -- is an archetype of the worst in the national character. Eriksson -- frail-looking but articulate and morally alert -- is the beleaguered best. The remainder of the unit is, of course, the hulking, muddled majority, all too willing to be conned by anyone who seems to be sure of his goals, however perverse. Their victim represents all of the innocents who, by accident, find themselves in the path of Yankee imperialism.

The script, by playwright David Rabe (Streamers, Hurlyburly), introduces some complexities into this schematic story. Eriksson owes his life to Meserve's military skills. The sergeant, who is not presented as a psychopath, and the other men are in a furor because a buddy has been killed in an ambush at a supposedly pacified village. Eriksson has an interesting speech in which he argues that the standard rationale for bad wartime behavior ("We might at any second be blown away") is exactly wrong. It is precisely because soldiers live inches from death that they should be "extra careful about what we do." The ending, in which Eriksson is awakened from his nightmare and, in effect, offered absolution by his trainmate, seems to propose that decent Americans may, at last, enjoy sleep untroubled by the naggings of historical conscience. It is, at least in popular-cultural terms, novel.

But still the movie does not work. Its true story is too singular to serve as the basis for moral generalizations. The ideas advanced by the film are, in any case, not significantly different from the ones put forward by opponents of the war while it was going on. But it is its distant and curiously monotonous tone that finally betrays Casualties of War. It numbs the conscience instead of awakening it.