45 pages • 1 hour read
A Soldier's Play
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Symbols & Motifs
Saluting
In the US military, saluting is a sign of mutual respect, and it is a customary gesture that is mandatory rather than optional. A person of inferior rank is expected to salute first, and the superior is expected to salute back. However, a superior can salute first without implying any sense of inferiority. There are multiple theories about the origins of saluting, but one suggests that it was a way to show that one’s hand is empty and not carrying a weapon to assassinate the other person. This notion is significant in the play, since the central conflict revolves around the presence of a hidden murderer in their midst.
Saluting symbolizes the hierarchical divisions of both professional standing and race that cause tensions in the unit. Waters, as a noncommissioned officer, does not have to be saluted by his men, which he resents. Taylor easily undermines Waters and his orders without a thought, and Waters must salute him for it. Later, according to Byrd’s testimony, when Waters is drunk on the evening he dies, the main reason that Byrd starts to antagonize Waters is that Waters refuses to salute Byrd as a superior officer. Wilcox has no trouble being respectful and saluting Davenport, but Byrd only does so after a show of reluctance, invoking The Endemic Nature of Racism.
These salutes are repeated at the beginning and end of each conversation, which is emphasized when Davenport not only does not return Smalls’s salute when he goes to see him in jail but nearly walks out without returning his second salute, as he is so disgusted by Smalls’s conduct. Smalls stops Davenport on his way out to salute, and Davenport at last reluctantly salutes back, suggesting that Davenport recognizes the tragedy and senselessness of Smalls’s situation even if his sympathy is limited.
Stripes and Bars
The characters refer to “stripes and bars” as metonymies to represent length of service and rank, and all the privileges, respect, and power that accompany them. Army rank is shaped around a two-class system, in which there are the enlisted and the commissioned. Enlisted soldiers join at the lowest possible rank, and their rank increases as they are promoted and put more years into service. Those who are commissioned are placed in officer positions after graduating from a military academy or officer training program. Enlisted soldiers can be promoted to the point of a noncommissioned officer rank, but unless they go into an elite military education institution or program, commissioned officers will always be their seniors. The stripes and bars thus symbolize both military ranking and the precarious status faced by Black soldiers within the army.
The discussion of stripes centers on Wilkie, who earned three stripes over 10 years of service until Waters took them away as disciplinary action for being drunk on duty. Wilkie claims at first that he thought the removal was “fair,” but when Davenport presses, he admits that he found the punishment unnecessarily harsh. The incident also explains why Wilkie will do anything to get his stripes back, including planting evidence under CJ’s bunk: For Wilkie, the stripes represent the self-respect and professional achievements he has lost.
The stripes and bars also embody the endemic nature of racism surrounding race and rank in the army. When Byrd describes his altercation with Waters to Taylor, he explains how he threatened to take away Waters’s stripes and insignia for refusing to salute while drunk and off duty. For Taylor, who is only comfortable with Black men as noncommissioned officers, Davenport’s presence is unnerving because Davenport isn’t simply wearing stripes—he is wearing bars, which are signifiers of rank for commissioned officers like Taylor. Moreover, he’s wearing the same bars as Taylor. Taylor exclaims that the bars don’t “look right” on a Black man, exposing his racist views that Black men should be artificially confined to inferior ranks. Alternately, Ellis is excited to see a Black man wearing officer bars, as Davenport’s success is an inspiration to the other Black men.
At the end of the play, Taylor admits that he was wrong to say that a Black man shouldn’t be wearing the bars, adding that he’ll have to “get used” to it. Davenport agrees that he will most certainly need to get used to it, suggesting that more Black men like Davenport will find ways to succeed despite the racism in the military.
“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”
In the stage directions at the beginning and end of both Act I and Act II, the playwright specifies that “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” a 1942 song performed by the Andrews Sisters, is played in each of the four transitions. The song sat at the number one spot on Your Hit Parade until 1943, becoming the longest-running war song to hang on in first place. The song recalls the era of World War II through a romanticized lens. In the play, it forms an ironic motif, contrasting the sentimentality and cheerfulness of the song with the dark events of the play.
When the song is played at the beginning of the play, it simply sets the scene and time period, as do the first images of men in World War II–era army uniforms. However, it quickly becomes clear that although the men are joking and laughing, their circumstances are far from normal: They are Black and in the South, their Black sergeant has been murdered, and the immediate suspicion is that the Ku Klux Klan is to blame. Moreover, the KKK has been responsible for multiple murders of Black soldiers from the base. There is thus nothing about their service that is heroic or idyllic for them.
When the song plays again at the end of Act I, Davenport has just accused several high-level officers of lying to protect Byrd and Wilcox, juxtaposing the song with an acknowledgment of corruption in the army that would place a white man’s reputation over a Black man’s life, once more emphasizing the military’s racism. At the beginning of Act II, the song plays again as Davenport gets dressed, transforming himself from an ordinary Black man into a Black captain, donning his uniform and affixing his officer bars. The song’s lyrics are from the perspective of a WWII soldier writing to his sweetheart back home and asking her to be faithful and wait for him, as if his only worry in the world is that she’ll meet another guy. The contrast between the song’s exuberant innocence and Davenport’s somber duty as a murder investigator once more draws attention to the stark contrast between the idealization of war and the military and the reality.
At the end of the play, the song plays once again, after Davenport’s narration in which he tells the audience that all the remaining men in the Black company were shipped overseas but quickly killed during an attack by the Germans. Undoubtedly, the Black soldiers would have been used on the front lines as cannon fodder when needed. None of the men would make it home to their families. By the end, the song is almost taunting with its sweet optimism, once more reflecting the cruel, ironic contrasts between image and reality.
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