The play takes place in 1944 at Fort Neal, a fictional military base near Tynin, Louisiana. The set is sparse, set up to depict Captain Charles Taylor’s office and the men’s barracks, but also to look like a courtroom. A song by the Andrews Sisters, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” plays as Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, a light-skinned Black man, crawls onstage. Like all the characters, he is dressed in a World War II–era uniform. Waters is extremely drunk and struggling to stand up, repeating, “They’ll still hate you!” (8) and laughing. An unseen man steps out of the shadows and shoots him twice. Waters falls dead.

The stage goes dark; then lights rise on the barracks, which house the all-Black Company B, 221st Chemical Smoke Generating Company. The five Black enlisted men who live in the barracks—Corporal Bernard Cobb, Private James Wilkie, Private Louis Henson, PFC Melvin Peterson, and Private Tony Smalls— are being frisked by Corporal Ellis, who is also Black. Ellis is searching for weapons. Captain Charles Taylor, a young white man and their supervising officer, watches uneasily.

Cobb insinuates that only a white man would have killed Waters.