YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsBook Review  Book review: 'Girl
by the Road at Night' by David Rabe  Boy meets girl in a sharp-
edged novel set during the Vietnam War but stripped of the
conventional war-story veneer.  August 22, 2010|By Laura
Collins-Hughes | Special to the Los Angeles Times   • Boy meets
girl, in a time of war. Boy meets girl, in a time of war. (David
Karp / For the Times )  Girl by the Road at Night  A Novel of
Vietnam  David Rabe  Simon and Schuster: 230 pp., $23  It was a
grant that determined the form David Rabe's writing on the
Vietnam War would take after he was discharged from the Army in
1967.  The money was for playwriting, and with it he began the
quartet of plays that would make him famous: "The Basic Training
of Pavlo Hummel," "Sticks and Bones," "The Orphan" and
"Streamers."  "But oddly enough, it was a novel rather than a
play that I wanted to work on," he wrote later. Still, even when
he was in Vietnam, trying to keep a journal, he found it
difficult to convey in prose what h