Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  During the Reagan era, Hollywood retrieved, dusted off, and modestly updated stock war-film materials. Once again, combat became a heroic enterprise, corrupted only by politicians. The Rambo films and the Missing in Action series captured the big bucks. Americans wanted to watch winners, not agonize over what happened or why it happened. They desired action, not introspection; results, not meaning. They wanted heroes for their next wars, not victims of lost crusades.

  But Oliver Stone had his own agenda, which smacked against the political currents of Hollywood and Washington. Much of Platoon is an echo, not only to the themes of Apocalypse Now but also to the antiwar literature of World War I. Sergeant Barnes, the scarred figure from both Stone’s own tour in Vietnam and Platoon, recalls Hemingway’s injured hero Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. And the use of Charlie Sheen as not only the protagonist but also the narrative guide serves the same purpose as Martin Sheen did in Apocalypse Now. The twin references announced that Platoon would explore both coming of age and the futility of modern war.

  The strength of Platoon emerged from Stone’s passion for and his palpable understanding of the subject. Like Hemingway, war was the defining experience in his life. He enlisted, he fought, he killed, he was injured; he believed, he questioned, he lost faith. He suffered the full range of emotions, entertained the gamut of thoughts. And when he turned to the subject, it was not like Francis Ford Coppola, Sylvester Stallone, or Chuck Norris, filmmakers and actors who embraced the war as a commercial vehicle rather than a biographical necessity. Stone, unlike others who depicted Vietnam on-screen, viewed the war as the central event not only in his life but also in the “soul” of America “and the world.”

  From the beginning of the Platoon project, he insisted on absolute realism. Anything less than fidelity would have betrayed his memory and experiences although the U.S. Department of Defense refused to cooperate on the film because it believed that it was a “totally unrealistic” depiction of the war. Stone maintained that the film was not about larger issues; it was about “boys in the field.” To ensure that his actors were as knowledgeable and competent as the real men of Bravo Company, he imposed a rigorous, two-week-long boot camp in the Philippine jungles under the dictatorial supervision of Captain Dale Dye, a twentyyear marine and a Vietnam veteran. Captain Dye subjected the cast to long marches with sixty-pound packs, cold army rations, and uncomfortable nights in foxholes, punctuated by sudden bursts of explosions to guarantee that no one would sleep. By the time filming began, the actors had the “tired, don’t-give-a-damn attitude” that Stone had hoped to achieve. In a short time, Stone and Dye had made soldiers out of actors.

  To maintain faith with his past, Stone set Platoon in a real time and a real place: his time, his place. The film details the activities of 25th Bravo Company, operating near the Cambodian border, in 1967. The film’s central character, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), views the war from a perspective similar to Stone’s. Like Stone, Taylor is a white, upper-middle-class kid who went to Vietnam to escape from the boredom and rigors of civilized life. His experiences in Vietnam mirror Stone’s: the reason why the film is so realistic and personal. The film’s initial impression of Vietnam focuses on the landscape, perhaps the overriding presence in the film. It is, in the fullest sense, a world without vision, a land of eight-foot elephant grass, overgrown virginal forests, and lush jungles. It is a landscape that one needs a machete to hack through. Much of the tension of the film originates in its confining setting; danger always seems to threaten from behind the next tree.

  Daily discomforts add to the tension. Stone’s Vietnam is a place where a grunt cannot relax. Mosquitoes swarm, ants bite, and leeches cling. Insects maintain a perpetual hum in the background, constantly reminding the viewer and the soldier of their presence. The product of a wealthy family, Chris finds it difficult to adjust to Vietnam’s fatal environment; he staggers under the weight of his pack, gags at the sight of a dead body, and attracts the ants and leeches like a magnet. Making matters worse, night seems to conspire with the harsh environment to deny rest to the weary Americans. Bombs explode, flares light up the sky, ambushers lurk everywhere. “You never really sleep,” observes Chris in a voice-over, as his year-long tour of Vietnam assumes the dimensions of an 8,760-hour day.

  The language in Platoon is similarly authentic. Fresh soldiers are “cherries” and “newbies”; Vietnam is “the Nam,” and America “the world”; pot smokers are “heads” that meet in the “underworld.” The film is also littered with obscenities, as Stone refused to pull any verbal punches. The music the soldiers listen to and the words they use reflect Stone’s own experiences. The use of Motown hits like “Tracks of My Tears” alongside country classics like “Okie from Muskogee” adds to the realistic aura and helps to divide the platoon into two hostile camps, the “heads” and the “juicers,” just as it was in Stone’s platoon. They are his people, “guys nobody really cares about” from small towns and villages, “the bottom of the barrel,” the undereducated and the uneducated.

  It is in the realistic portrayal of the platoon itself that the film departs most radically from the traditional war genre. The classic World War II film upholds the ideal of the melting pot: out of many, one. Multiethnic, multireligious, and multiregional, the platoon is a smorgasbord of Italians, Poles, and Irish; Protestants, Jews, and Catholics; Brooklyn sharpies, southern Rebs, and midwestern rubes. Yet they all pull together toward a common goal. No such comfortable and comforting arrangement is present in Platoon. Stone observed a clear “moral division” in his platoon when he served in Vietnam, and Bravo’s cinematic counterpart is faithful to Stone’s memory. On a symbolic level, the film centers on the two sergeants, Elias and Barnes. For Barnes, all civilians are potential Vietcong and are liable to ruthless treatment. Elias, however, takes a more compassionate “hearts and minds” approach to the war. He wants to save Vietnam; Barnes merely wants to destroy the country.

  But the platoon is split over more than war aims. Unlike traditional war films, Stone shows how race divided soldiers in Vietnam. In the base camp, African Americans are usually by themselves, shunted off to one side. Black soldiers are aware that they are being treated unfairly. One complains that they have to take extra turns on Cong ambush patrol because of racial politics, and another objects to “always being fucked by the rich.” They are not, however, passive victims. Junior, a black grunt, for example, is not afraid to order Chris around. “Hey, white boy!” he shouts, before encouraging him to dig a foxhole with a little more enthusiasm. The only place blacks and whites can comfortably coexist is in the underworld, where, supervised by Sergeant Elias, they dance together in a drug-induced haze to the sounds of Smokey Robinson. In 1967, a year that saw race riots in Detroit and other cities and heard former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Stokely Carmichael call for a black revolution, race was as much of an issue in Vietnam as it was in America. Stone, unlike other filmmakers, brought this reality to the screen. By doing so, he added a deeper, more nuanced understanding of America.

  Despite their divisions, soldiers have to pull together when they are in combat. It is in these sequences that Stone achieves the greatest sense of realism in the film. Stone’s war is the grunt’s war, a war without maps, red and blue arrows, or a grand design. Men fight because they are attacked, not for any lofty goal or territorial objective, and battles often end as inconclusively as they begin. In such contests, winning loses any elevated meaning; soldiers fight to survive. Period.

  The mise-en-scène of the battle sequences underscores Stone’s idea of combat. His camera work captures Karl von Clausewitz’s notion of the “fog of war.” The camera becomes Chris’s eyes jerking back and forth, seeing nothing distinctly, and blindly reacting to threats both perceived and real. Violence erupts suddenly and brutally, often without warning or meaning. Death and injury are neither noble nor ignoble, they just are. The best answer to the suffering and violence is given early in the film by Barnes. In true
Hemingway fashion, he clamps his hand over a screaming, dying man and demands that he “take the pain.”

  Premiering in New York and Los Angeles in December 1986, Platoon created an international sensation and propelled Stone into the forefront of American directors. Time proclaimed that Stone’s effort portrayed “Viet Nam as It Really Was,” and the New York Times’ Vincent Canby called the film “a succession of found moments,” that is, it had rediscovered the lost reality of the war. More importantly for Hollywood and Oliver Stone, Platoon was a massive commercial success as well. Made for a paltry $6.5 million, the film grossed $136 million in U.S. box office receipts. Video sales pushed the total gross to a staggering $250 million. For now, Stone believed that he had exorcised the demons of Vietnam, and he looked forward to new projects.

  The whole point of Platoon was that it was not just a film project; it was Stone: his biography, his vision, his nightmare. He could no more set Vietnam aside than Hemingway could forget his war or Ahab abandon his whale. Platoon had not ended his dialogue with America about the war; it had only started it.

  After Platoon, Stone made two movies, Wall Street and Talk Radio, before returning to Vietnam with a version of Ron Kovic’s autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July. He had been interested in the project since 1980, but there was no money in Hollywood for a film about a paraplegic Vietnam veteran who discovers that all his country’s cherished ideals are false and that the war in Vietnam was a sham. In a Hollywood marked by escape and fantasy, and a Washington following in lockstep, Kovic and Stone were as warmly embraced as repo men. They were pounding on the door, trying to get inside to claim their America, but nobody was at home. The financial success of Platoon, however, gave Stone the sledge he needed to break down the door.

  Born on the Fourth of July centers on America’s fatal flaw, the culture that conditions and indoctrinates young men to go to war. It is a brutal culture, life-hating, joy-denying, pleasure-destroying. In the film, Stone labors to subvert that culture, and by casting Tom Cruise in the lead, he moved far in that direction. By the mid-1980s, Cruise had become America’s smile, the charming good-bad boy of Top Gun and Risky Business. Stone took Cruise’s chiseled good looks and spit-shined image and caked them with mud. “Tom had the classical facial structure of an athlete,” noted Stone. “He’s the kid off a Wheaties box. I wanted to yank the kid off that box and mess with his image, take him to the dark side.”

  Seldom in the American cinema has the dark side initially seemed so benign. The opening sequences of the film are infused with a soft, golden light, and falling autumn leaves create a snow-globe effect. Everything about Kovic’s Massapequa has a Norman Rockwell familiarity: small town and safe streets, boys playing war in the woods and men mouthing platitudes about the need to serve, rippling flags and firecrackers on the Fourth of July, baseball games and Yankee caps, wrestling matches and first loves. Kovic is his mother’s “little Yankee Doodle Boy,” born on the Fourth of July and raised with loving care. Yet something is out of whack in his comfortable, middle-class America. A parading World War II veteran flinches at the sound of an exploding firecracker, a coach’s quest for victory borders on obsession, a mother’s religious faith merges into zealotry. Kovic is taught not only to be upright, courteous, reverent, and clean but also that winning is everything, God hates quitters, communists are banging on our doors, and Uncle Sam needs you. As America’s perfect son, he moves naturally from the Boy Scouts to the marines.

  For Kovic and Stone, the culture of winning, violence, and unquestioning loyalty was America’s dark side. It was a culture that despised softness and sensitivity and created a god out of John Wayne; in Kovic’s book, he writes that he resented having to give his “dead dick for John Wayne.” These forces, family, community, school, imbued Kovic and Stone with a cold war mentality and the idea that manliness could be found only on a battlefield. The power of the culture makes Kovic’s disillusionment all the more wrenching. After being wounded and returning home, he blames his country for making him go to Vietnam. “They told us to go,” he cries, implicating the faceless establishment for perpetrating an immoral war.

  Kovic’s story also shows how easily this dark side can be foisted onto the next generation. As he rides through a crowd during a Fourth of July parade, his eyes come to rest on a boy who looks much as he once did. The child’s Yankees cap and his toy gun suggest that little has changed since his own youth. By exposing America’s dark side, Stone pushes his analysis of Vietnam beyond that presented in Platoon. Unlike Platoon, which made no effort to explain the larger issues behind the war, Born on the Fourth of July suggests that Vietnam, and war in general, are a product of America’s own moral deficiencies, a theme that he would further explore in later films.

  Kovic’s and Stone’s disillusionment is fueled by outrage, because they believed that they had been duped by their country’s martial culture. The film implies that only the true believers, boys like Kovic born on the Fourth of July, evinced a willingness to fight and die for their country. Most of Kovic’s high school classmates cannot understand why he wants to enlist; they do not feel particularly threatened by communists, and they are not moved by any overwhelming impulse to be “part of history.” They seek only normal lives and a chance to prosper financially. When Kovic returns from Vietnam in a wheelchair, his friends have moved on with their lives. They are husbands, fathers, budding entrepreneurs, as distant as people can be from what he experienced on the other side of the world. Perhaps even more than his injuries, his friends’ apathy gnaws at him. While he is consumed with the war, they could not care less. A hospital orderly tells him, “You can take your Vietnam and shove it up your ass.” “They don’t give a shit about the war,” his friend Stevie adds. Even his mother switches the television station to Laugh In when a story about a Vietnam War protest comes on the news.

  Stone shared Kovic’s attitude toward America and his desire to shake his sleeping countrymen. The messages of Born on the Fourth of July are don’t forget and get involved. America fought and lost the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a needless, senseless war, the product of a military culture and blind ideological faith. And unless Americans begin to question that culture and that faith, it will happen again. On this point, Stone and Kovic are products of the late 1960s and early 1970s political radicalization. Conservatives argue that protest movements had no effect. Stone disagreed. “That’s why making Born was a particular thrill,’cause it was flying in the face of that shit,” he said. “People were outraged, I’d get letters saying... there was no protest, no hatred, why are you bringing up all this divisiveness? But I remember the late’60s as a very rough time....A lot of people can’t face their past, you know.”

  Stone felt so strongly about the message of the film that he allowed it to interrupt the narrative flow. Most of the film deals with Kovic’s coming to terms with the forces that shaped him, a struggle that is largely internal and intellectual. The film ends, however, with sketchy scenes of Kovic’s political activism, and the manipulation of historical footage to put Cruise/Kovic at the 1972 Republican Convention contrasts sharply with the camera work of the rest of the film. But the transition from internal search to external activism, personal to political, is the message of Born on the Fourth of July.

  Stone’s concern for America’s involvement in the war runs even deeper, however. It was not enough for the director just to show the impact of the war on an individual, on Ron Kovic, Chris Taylor, or Oliver Stone. It was not enough just to be the cinematic Hemingway of the Vietnam War. Stone wanted to be the war’s historian as well. As a historian of the war, Stone moves on two levels: personal and political. Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July are primarily personal statements, though the political lurks beneath the surface. Both films were huge critical and commercial successes (Born on the Fourth of July was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including an Oscar for Stone for best director).

  Heaven and Earth (1994) is
also largely a personal film of selfdiscovery, although it too has a historical and political message. The war, Stone says, was not only, or even mostly, about the United States. The overwhelming majority of people who were killed in the war were Vietnamese, and most of them were civilians. It was their land that was destroyed, their economy that was shattered, and their culture that was threatened with ruin. Stone commented that he made the film for two reasons: first, to explore the themes of Buddhist spirituality, reverence for ancestors, and respect for the land, and second,

  to respond to, in part, the blind militarism and mindless revisionism of the Vietnam War as typified by a certain odious brand of thinking that has snaked its way into our culture over the past decade or so, in which the conflict is refought in comic-book style by American superheroes, with a brand new ending... we win! Within the moronic context of these ideas, hundreds of nameless, faceless, Vietnamese are blithely and casually shot, stabbed, and blown to smithereens, utterly without the benefit of human consideration. Entire villages are triumphantly laid to waste, with not one microsecond of thought or care given to those inside the little bamboo hamlets being napalmed. Who were they?

  In his attempt to give “the reverse angle” of the war, Stone succeeds. He depicts Phang Thy Le Ly Hayslip’s world in loving detail, from the agricultural cycle to the serene beauty of the land to the peaceful stability of village and religious life. Seldom has a commercial filmmaker devoted so much attention to the undramatic nature of a third-world culture. When Stone finally turns his attention to Americans, he portrays them as rich, barbaric invaders. They intrude into the Vietnamese civil war, overlay it with an alien ideological meaning, then take it over, destroying or corrupting everything they touch. They disrupt nature by destroying entire villages, defoliating forests, and severing the rice cycle. American forces turn Le Ly’s “most beautiful village on earth” into a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Culturally, American capitalism corrupts the country, sending villagers to cities and bases where they become pimps, prostitutes, and black marketeers. Drawing not only on Le Ly’s memoirs but also on his own experiences as an MP, Stone is at his best when showing American GIs at their worst.