Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Because he was a well-educated white male, the army offered Stone a position at Officer Candidate School. He refused and requested infantry duty. His decision to go to war in Vietnam appears rash but actually stemmed from a number of factors. To be sure, he had been hurt by the series of personal and literary rejections. But he was equally upset by the grand literary pretensions he had harbored. In a sense, his decision to enlist was an act of atonement for his perceived character flaws; he yearned to obliterate the ego he had created and, after a long bout with individualism, become an “anonymous” grunt. Though he often considered suicide, he could not bring himself to “pull the trigger.” Instead, he resolved to let someone else pull it for him on a battlefield.

  But perhaps more than anything else, Stone went to Vietnam simply because he believed in the war. Like many other Americans who grew up during the 1950s, he had learned to “fear Russians and hate Communism.” He fully believed that communism needed to be stopped in order to preserve American democracy, and he felt it was his duty to fight. His father had served during World War II, his grandfather during World War I. Now it was his turn to serve his country and, by doing so, to announce that he was “a man.” Imbued with both pathos and patriotism, Private Bill Stone (he chose to enlist using his first name, fearing that “Oliver” was too effeminate) left for Vietnam on September 14, 1967, and was assigned to the second platoon of Bravo Company, Third Battalion, 25th Infantry, stationed near the Cambodian border.

  Naive optimism and idealism soon crumbled under the weight of reality. Vietnam was not the same place it had been in 1965. By 1967, many Vietnamese had gone from loving to loathing the occupying Americans. Corruption ran rampant as noncombatants lived high, far behind the lines, and unscrupulous sergeants stole supplies to sell on the black market. Stone quickly discovered that Vietnam was not a people’s conflict but a politicians’ war fought by the poorest Vietnamese and Americans. Just as disconcerting for him were the unexpected attitudes of his new comrades in arms, who made it clear to him that he was as “expendable” as a piece of “raw meat.” Very quickly he realized that enlisting had been “a terrible mistake” and that he was “in deep.” One of his only pleasures was writing long, introspective letters to his grandmother, Adele Goddet, in France.

  Stone was given little time to adjust to his new surroundings. After only a week, he found himself on point in a night ambush. He struggled through nearly a week of field duty without confronting the enemy. His greatest adversaries were the incessant swarms of mosquitoes that kept him awake at night, the spiders that crawled in his shirt, and the fifty pounds of equipment on his back that nearly overwhelmed him as he humped through the jungle. One night he fell asleep during his watch, waking to discover that the Vietcong (VC) were practically on top of the platoon. Numbed with fear, he forgot his training and silently stared. A comrade opened fire on the oncoming troops, jolting Stone out of his stupor. He pulled the trigger, but had forgotten to take the safety off his M-16. Eventually, he regained his bearings and the platoon beat back the VC approach, but not before at least one American was severely wounded. Stone received a flesh wound in the neck during the melee and was briefly out of action.

  His first taste of battle improved his combat sense. It also, despite his mistake during the ambush, put him more at ease with the other members of the platoon. He could not, however, completely fit in. The differences in background between him and the other grunts were obvious. He enjoyed classical music and serious literature, while they favored Hank Williams and Motown, hard liquor and serious drugs. One of Stone’s comrades later recalled that he was “a quiet person who kept to himself.” At first, he did not drink, spending his leisure hours writing stories of his experiences. Slowly, however, the war changed him. As his tour dragged on, he felt himself becoming disconnected from his civilized roots and becoming a “jungle animal,” operating less on reason than instinct. Increasingly, he sided with the progressive element of the platoon, who preferred Motown and drugs to the country music and alcohol that fueled the platoon’s other faction. Stone’s association with this group, composed mostly of lower-class blacks and whites from small towns, expanded his horizons and exposed him to the social injustice and prejudice of American life.

  Then came 1968. There was nothing happy about Stone’s new year. On January 1, he and 700 other U.S. soldiers were attacked by some 2,000 VC troops at Firebase Burt. The enemy lobbed mortars into the American entrenchment before beginning a ground assault at one in the morning. The American perimeter collapsed, and Stone’s platoon was thrown into the counterattack. The VC inched forward, taking bunker after bunker, and the battle quickly devolved into brutal handto-hand combat. But the fighting came to an abrupt close when American planes dropped bombs directly on the American position, killing friend and foe without discrimination. The incident embittered Stone. As he watched bulldozers push lifeless Vietnamese bodies into a mass grave, he wondered if the American force had been no more than bait, a dab of honey designed to lure the antlike VC army into the open.

  But Stone had little time to ponder. Just two weeks later, Bravo Company was hit again, this time while on patrol a few miles from Firebase Burt. Bravo’s third platoon stumbled into a VC bunker complex and got pinned down. The first platoon faced a similar predicament. It was up to Stone and the second platoon to extricate the men from the morass. But Stone’s jungle instincts let him down; he got caught in a trip-wire explosion and received shrapnel in his leg and his rear. Medics shot him full of morphine, packed him on a stretcher, and loaded him on a helicopter. Bravo Company took about thirty casualties without inflicting any. Stone’s rehabilitation kept him off the field during the Tet Offensive, which further devastated Bravo. By the time he returned to duty, he barely recognized anyone in his largely reconstructed platoon.

  After another brief stint on combat duty, he was transferred to a military police auxiliary battalion in Saigon, where he guarded barracks and trolled for miscreants. The new duty bored Stone, and he numbed the tedium with drugs. The jungle beckoned. He wanted to get back into the heat of battle and got his wish after brawling with a rear-duty sergeant. In order to avoid having his tour extended as punishment, Stone opted in April 1968 to volunteer for the First Cavalry Division’s reconnaissance and minesweeping detail.

  The transfer proved portentous for his later career. While in the First Cavalry, Stone met a large black man from a small town in Tennessee who would later become the basis for “King” in his first film about Vietnam, Platoon. He also met a half-Spanish, half-Apache sergeant named Juan Angel Elias, who fascinated him. Elias, recalls Stone, “was like a rock star in the body of a soldier.” Rather than terrify, the compassionate Elias inspired his men. He was a heavy drug user who was loathed by the lifers and juicers. Stone stayed close to Elias, learning how to rely on his senses, not his intellect, during combat. For the first time, Stone believed that it was possible to be both a good soldier and a good person.

  By now, Stone had become a veteran, a fact he demonstrated in August 1968 when his platoon got pinned down by a North Vietnamese Army soldier with a machine gun in a foxhole. With his fellow soldiers trapped under a hail of bullets, Stone lost contact with reality and functioned on pure instinct. With reckless abandon, he charged the bunker and, while on the run, lobbed a grenade directly into the hole, thus buying time for the platoon to be rescued. He is still at a loss to explain what happened to him. “Something went crazy in my head,” he explains. “I flipped out.” He received the Bronze Star for his heroism and confusion.

  As the war dragged on, Stone sensed a loss of basic humanity. Yet another transfer brought him under the influence of Platoon Sergeant Barnes. Barnes had become something of an army legend. He had been wounded six or seven times, and one shot over the eye had left a large, sickle-shaped scar down the left side of his face. A passionate soldier, he volunteered to return to combat after every wound. In contrast to Elias, Barnes was “a very frightening man” with a “cold s
tare” that grunts felt “all the way down to [their] balls.” Stone and the other awestruck soldiers were terrified yet intrigued by the grizzled warrior. From Barnes, Stone learned how to suppress his emotions, kill, and become a disciplined, mechanized soldier. A leading character in Stone’s film Platoon says “I think now, we did not fight the enemy—we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us.” This is the soul of the film. Death came to concern him no more than life, and his sense of right and wrong eroded. He burned villages on “a steady basis.” He watched uncaringly as frustrated U.S. troops sprayed mosquito repellent on their feet to make them sore so they could avoid marching and as they committed random acts of violence against Vietnamese civilians. He coolly stood by as one soldier, who would become “Bunny” in Platoon, bashed an old woman’s head in with his rifle butt. In one village, Stone lost control and began shooting at an old man’s feet because “he wouldn’t stop smiling” at him. He could not, however, bring himself to kill the old man. Finally, he was shaken out of his complacency when he witnessed two U.S. soldiers raping a young village girl. He broke up the incident and decided that it was time to reassert his humanity. Looking at the world around him, he noticed the natural beauty of Vietnam. He purchased a 35mm Pentax and took the first of hundreds of snapshots of the country. For the first time, he thought of the war in visual terms.

  Stone received his discharge orders in late November 1968. In fifteen months, he had earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster for his multiple wounds. Yet even now there was sadness. Just before he was shipped home, he learned that Sergeant Elias had been killed, possibly by an errant American grenade. Stone was eager to leave the heat, insects, fatigue, jungle rot, and frustration behind, but he was still uncertain about his future. He thought that the war was “rotten and corrupt” and lacked “moral purpose” and integrity, but he did not feel that he could challenge the system. Burned out and drugged up, the twenty-two-year-old private returned to the United States with no immediate plans.

  He was not prepared to return to his father’s New York, a city of commerce, commitment, and respectability. So, without even letting his parents know that he had come back from the war, he fled to Mexico. He found the experience unsatisfying and headed north after only a few days. But his homecoming would not be a happy one. American authorities busted Stone at the border for carrying two ounces of Vietnamese marijuana and threw him into a federal jail in San Diego. He faced the unpleasant prospect of five to twenty years behind bars. It was two weeks before prison officials allowed him to call his dad, but once Louis put up $2,500 for his son’s defense, the public attorney suddenly took an interest in Stone’s case, and he was soon released. The experience convinced him that nobody in America cared about Vietnam veterans and served to further radicalize him. Having seen injustice abroad, conditions in the prison alerted him to injustice at home. The jail was as horrible as those in Saigon. Inmates were stuffed “in every fucking nook and cranny,” and 5,000 prisoners, mostly young blacks and Hispanics, had to sleep on the floor.

  Life outside of prison was not much better. Stone returned to New York and life with his father. Louis, however, complained about Oliver’s drug use and ghetto speech. Further, Oliver felt estranged from his old acquaintances. His friends had avoided the war, and most of his Vietnam buddies went back to the small, southern towns they came from. Americans’ lack of interest in the war, their “mass indifference,” stung him. Nobody wanted to hear his stories of Vietnam’s horrors; they were much more interested in the business of making money. Even the antiwar movement troubled and disgusted him. He felt that it was not really serious about becoming “militarized and politicized” in order to force a peace and served only as a means for pampered college students to blow off steam.

  Deciding that he would never be at peace with himself until he had written about Vietnam, Stone began writing a screenplay called Break, a story that moved on a symbolic level but contained characters that would later become Rhah, King, Bunny, Lehner, Barnes, and Elias in Platoon. After working slavishly on the script, he sent it to Jim Morrison of the Doors, whom he envisioned as the star. Though he never heard back from the singer, the experience convinced him that he could be a filmmaker. He was accepted at New York University’s film school and studied under Martin Scorsese, who believed that, despite his penchant for cinematic excess, Stone showed potential as a filmmaker. He was particularly impressed with his student’s first film, Last Year in Vietnam, a touching appraisal of the trials and tribulations of a Vietnam vet coming home. But Stone did not blend well with the other students. He was older than most and a loner by nature, leading many to believe that he was arrogant. Similarly, he found himself unable to participate in NYU’s political scene. While other students marched, Stone advocated “a fucking revolution.” He wanted to push beyond “bullshit meetings and conferences” and called for an armed march on Washington.

  Stone’s marriage in 1971 to Najwa Sarkis, a Lebanese woman who worked for the Moroccan Mission to the United Nations, seemed to calm him a bit. She made enough to support them both and encouraged him to work on writing screenplays. He completed his degree in September 1971 and began to bounce from job to job. While he wrote screenplays, he earned money as a Xerox boy for a copy pool, a messenger, and a cabdriver. By mid-1976, he had written eleven scripts and even directed one, Seizure, on a shoestring budget in Canada but failed to attract much critical or popular attention. It seemed he was going nowhere at a frantic pace. His marriage fell apart, he quit one job after another, and success continued to elude him. As America celebrated its bicentennial, Oliver Stone was a marginally employed twenty-five year old living in a cheap apartment in New York City.

  Had Stone been a movie character, he would have been Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. He had lost all faith in the government, largely due to the trauma of Watergate. Oddly, he admired Nixon, whose toughness, conservatism, and emotionlessness reminded him of his father, but the scandal destroyed any respect he may have had for the president. Watergate also convinced him that the government was “a lie” and “hammered home the point” that it had “lied to us about Ho Chi Minh and it lied to us about the Vietnam War.” His depression was magnified when his grandmother died in 1976. Instead of adding to his rootlessness, however, her death inspired Stone to rededicate himself to making something of his life. Armed with this newfound conviction, he turned once again to Vietnam, the real Vietnam this time, not a symbolic one. In a few weeks of furious typing he produced the screenplay for Platoon.

  Stone started shopping Platoon around Hollywood and attracted the attention of Stan Kamen of the William Morris Agency. Encouraged, he moved to Los Angeles, but no studio expressed interest in the film. The writing, however, was powerful enough that Columbia Pictures hired him to write a treatment of Billy Hayes’s autobiography, Midnight Express. His screenplay won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay of 1978 and brought more opportunities his way, including an offer from producer Marty Bergman (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon) to write a screenplay for Ron Kovic’s book, Born on the Fourth of July. Al Pacino was set to star, and William Friedkin was to direct. The releases of The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, however, threatened to overload the market for Vietnam films, and Born’s funding fell through three days before shooting was to begin.

  But work was now easier to find. Stone wrote and directed The Hand (1981), a low-budget thriller starring Michael Caine, and produced an early version of the script for Conan the Barbarian (1982). In Hollywood, he was earning a reputation for writing violent, right-wing screenplays, a charge that gained strength from his scripts for Scarface (1983), Year of the Dragon (1985), and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). He resented the stereotype and found inspiration in Warren Beatty’s Reds, a film that proved to him that a Hollywood movie could be both big-budget and leftist. Then, in 1984, Dino Delaurentis agreed to finance Platoon. Once again, however, funding fell through at the last moment. It was not until after the surprise success of
Salvador (1986), which did well on video despite being underpromoted, that he received solid backing for Platoon, and then only by Hemdale, a British-based operation.

  Part of Stone’s problem with getting the funding for Platoon had to do with Hollywood’s suspicion that Vietnam War films were both too controversial and too economically risky. This notion began to take form while Stone himself was still serving in Vietnam. In 1967, John Wayne filmed The Green Berets at Fort Benning, Georgia. Released in 1968 after the Tet Offensive, the hawkish, proAmerican film provoked a violent left-wing critical response. “Unspeakable... stupid,... rotten,…false,…vile and insane,” commented Renata Adler in the New York Times. “Immoral... racist,” agreed Michael Korda in Glamour. “Childishly sleazy,” added Frank Mararella in Cinema Magazine. Although the film found its audience and made money, Hollywood producers who did not have Wayne’s clout with moviegoers decided that the war was simply too hot.

  For the next decade, filmmakers treated the war as little more than a reference or a source of inspiration. The WAR, that bloody, passionate creature sitting in America’s living room, was not mentioned. Then came the first tentative steps. In 1978, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter explored the mentality of soldiers returning from the war, with mixed critical and financial results. The same year, Go Tell the Spartans, a fine film, was all but ignored. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola released Apocalypse Now, a film buried beneath so much myth and symbol that critics read it as both hawkish and dovish. Its profound ambivalence or perhaps its psychological complexity may have penetrated to the heart of war’s darkness, but it failed to say much about the everyday nature of combat.