Beidler discusses Rabe's "Vietnam Trilogy" (which also includes the plays Sticks and Bones and Streamers) calling The Basic Traimng of Pavel Hummel "a mad pastiche of the American experience in Vietnam." The critic terms Rabe's contributions vital to literature concerning Vietnam.

In the most important contributions to the dramatic literature of Vietnam during the period 1970-75— David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, the first two plays in what, with the addition of Streamers in 1977, would become a major trilogy—the principle of bringing the war home evolved into a central thematic issue. Similarly ..., the attempt to explore the effects of Vietnam on actual American life would also come to suggest the degree to which the war's horror had been implicit in the American character from the outset, a collective tragedy waiting to happen, a prophetic curse hiding at the...