Foreword to Oscar Serlin's The Soldier's Dilemma

Abstract

Oscar Serlin's The Soldier's Dilemma is a fictional adaptation of Aeschylus's Eumenides. His play re-imagines the themes of divided loyalties to kin and family, themes that are central to the Oresteia trilogy and the choice Orestes makes, when he kills his mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge his father, Agamemnon. In this new play, the trilogy's ancient settings, Argos, Delphi, and Athens are adapted both in terms of time and place. Orestes's matricide and his trial inspire this modern retelling of the aftermath of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in March 1968 through the fictional court-martial trial of Private Francis Orestes, a soldier who kills two of his fellow soldiers, after they perpetrate atrocities against the non-combatant population of one of the hamlets in that area, fictionally renamed as designation “Agamemnon.” In adapting the cycle of kin-killing and bloodguilt of the royal family of Argos, Oscar Serlin revisits the events of the massacre at My Lai and returns to the question of the perpetrators’ accountability. Like his ancient namesake, the modern Orestes takes justice in his own hands and makes the difficult choice to avenge the lives of the innocent Vietnamese victims. In The Soldier's Dilemma, Francis Orestes kills Lieutenant Clyde Anderson and Private William Nestor (their names are a play on “Clytemnestra,” the name of Orestes's mother in the Oresteia), when his superiors fail to seek any redress for these crimes. The play confronts the unmendable rift between a group of three friends who were fellow soldiers and explores the warping of bonds of loyalty, brotherhood, and friendship in the context of that war.The setting of the play is the prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where Private Francis Orestes is held before he is tried on two charges of first-degree murder. The trial of Francis Orestes in The Soldier's Dilemma does not aim at representing the procedures, typical of court martial trials. It is modeled instead upon Orestes's trial in the ancient play with one significant difference: unlike Orestes in Eumenides, the American Orestes is found guilty of his crimes. The play's free adaptation of the ancient trial also re-imagines the historical events surrounding Second Lieutenant William Calley's trial who was convicted for the killings of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. William Calley was sentenced to life in prison; he served for three years and was subsequently released. The Soldier's Dilemma returns to the My Lai tragedy fifty years later, creating space for exploring one of the darkest chapters of that war as an American tragedy.Oscar Serlin was a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2019, when he took my course on “The Aftermath of War in Ancient Greek Drama.” The course focused on the experiences of the ancients with wartime suffering and trauma as a framework for exploring the aftermath of war today. It covered topics such as veterans’ PTSD, the plight of refugees and migrants, and violence against women in war. Oscar's play began as a group project with three other students, Vincent Kim, Hamza Lodhia, and Max Serlin. He later developed it into The Soldier's Dilemma.