Stone's memoir, Chasing the Light, is released on July 21 and details his life up to the release of Platoon. Parts are excerpted in The Daily Mail and below, because the Daily Mail site is a cancer:
"In the summer of 1968, as a 21-year-old soldier in Vietnam, I became an acknowledged killer.
We had run into a mean little ambush which had cost us a lieutenant and a sergeant, as well as our scout dog, a German shepherd I’d taken a liking to. It was one of those strange firefights that grew from a few random shots into a disorganized raging storm of bullets. And now it was becoming even more than that – a mean little ambush set up between our two platoons that could result in a dangerous crossfire.
I was under no obligation to do anything but keep my head down and let it work itself out. Yet I strongly felt I had to do something, or this would really turn ugly. Maybe I was just cold and angry about the dog’s death, or the futility of it all. Or maybe I just had a headache and the sun was burning too hot in my eyes. Who the f*** knows these things? All I knew was that this was my moment to act.
Exposing myself to the enemy, I moved up quickly on a one-man spider hole between our two platoons – from which I sensed someone had just fired. On instinct, from 15 yards out, I pulled the pin on my grenade and hurled it.
It was a crazy risk. If I’d overthrown the grenade it probably would’ve wounded or killed some of our own men crouched beyond the hole.
But it was a perfect pitch, and the grenade sailed into the tiny hole like a long throw from an outfielder into a catcher’s mitt, followed quickly by the concussed thump of the explosion. Wow. I’d done it!
Warily I moved in closer, thinking he might still be alive, but when I looked down into the hole the young man was mauled, torn and very dead. It felt good. I actually saw the man I killed, which was rare in this jungle warfare.
The dozen men who saw the action seemed astonished by my move. Somehow word got around, and I was quite surprised a week later to be told that I was going to get a Bronze Star, awarded for valour in combat. For what? Doing what I was supposed to do.
My description might seem callous, but it isn’t – that moment will stay with me for the rest of my life. I see the moment again and again in my consciousness.
I feel no guilt. He’s dead. I’m alive. That’s the way it works. We all trade places, if not in this life then in another time and place."
Stone later describes the Battle of Firebase Burt which took place on January 1, 1968, and which he would recreate in Platoon:
"As night fell, our two-battalion perimeter came under massive attack from a North Vietnamese regiment coming across the Cambodian border. The battle would last till nearly dawn. The sound of small-arms fire, heavy artillery and bombs hardly let up all night, bigger than any fireworks I’d ever seen. Stunningly beautiful, in its way.
And now there was an enormous roar like I suppose the end of the world sounds. Like a shark cutting through water, an F-4 Phantom jet fighter was coming in very low over our perimeter out of the night sky. So low, that doomsday sound. They were going to drop their payload on us and we were all going to die. [...]
Full daylight revealed charred bodies, dusty napalm and grey trees. Men who died grimacing, in frozen positions, some of them still standing or kneeling in rigor mortis, white chemical death on their faces. Dead, so dead. Some covered in white ash, some burned black. Their expressions, if they could be seen, were overtaken with anguish and horror.
In the next hours I grasped the extent of what had happened. Most of the dead were fully uniformed, well-armed North Vietnamese regulars.
Those who were relatively intact we brought in on stretchers, walking out to find them, or pieces of them. A bulldozer had been airlifted in to dig burial pits. I helped throw the bloating bodies into the giant pits late into that day.
There were maybe 400 of their dead. We’d lost some 25 men, with more than 150 wounded, yet I hadn’t fired a single shot or even seen one enemy soldier. It was bizarre.
We worked in rotating shifts, two men, three men, swinging the corpses like a haul of fish from the sea. Later we poured fuel on them, and then the bulldozers rolled mounds of dirt over them, so they’d be forever extinct.
I was too young to understand. No person should ever have to witness so much death.
Almost a year later, in November 1968, I left Vietnam. By this time I’d served in three different combat units. I’d been wounded and evacuated twice – the first when a piece of shrapnel (or possibly a bullet) went clean through my neck in a night ambush; the second after a daylight enemy ambush, where shrapnel from a charge planted in a tree penetrated my legs and buttocks."
Stone goes on to describe being arrested for a small amount of marijuana upon his return to the United States. After charges were dropped, he returned to New York City wracked with PTSD:
"When I got to New York that December, I was coiled and tight, a jungle creature, living 24/7 on the edge of my nerves, even when I slept.
I didn’t know any combat vets in New York, and found myself out of my depth in a sea of civilians rushing around, making a huge deal of money, success, jobs – which to me was petty daily stuff compared with surviving. I was confused, in no shape to go anywhere.
With my combat bonuses I had significant savings, and I didn’t spend much of them on renting a series of cheap apartments downtown. One was on East 9th Street, in those days a junkie ghetto. I painted the walls a deep red and, for good measure, the ceiling. Red for blood, red for creativity. Maybe the war had made me that way.
I bought some screenplay books, out of curiosity. I had an urge, a nervous reflex, to write. It was, frankly, the only way I could express myself. I’d already tried to write a novel before I’d gone to Vietnam. But screenplay-writing was something new, sexier.
So I channeled the feelings inside me as a screenplay. It was about Vietnam, and it fitted right in with the mood of my weird apartment. [...] Looking for a thread, I started to peck away at a story based on my memories of January 1, 1968. Writing quickly in longhand, building a muscle of memory mixed with some imagination. I called it simply ‘The Platoon’.
This was not just going to be about me. This was going to be about all of us who went on that journey without an ending: lost men whose future in contemporary America was bleak. And I’d be the observer. My alter ego would be Chris Taylor, later authentically played by Charlie Sheen.
As I wrote, I especially remembered two soldiers who stood out: both were sergeants. Sergeant ‘Barnes’, as I renamed him in the film, had the pride of Achilles, an avatar of war, quiet and dangerous, darkly handsome, prominently scarred, afraid of nothing.
If Sergeant Barnes, played by Tom Berenger, was Achilles, Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, was Hector: noble but doomed.
You’re not supposed to use the word ‘beautiful’ for a man, but Elias was: a beautiful Apache mixed with some Spanish. Rumour had it that he’d ‘done time’ back in the world and probably made a deal with a judge to join up. Whereas Barnes was hard and real, Elias was dreamy, a movie star. He was fun to be around, and everyone liked him.
I heard that Elias had been killed in action a month after I’d moved on from his platoon. The news came casually, like a baseball score on an overheard radio. A grenade had accidentally gone off. It was one of ours, not even an ambush or a firefight. A man as good as Elias wasted by someone’s mistake. My God. In time, the Elias story was layered into my nest of memories, and I’d use his real name to honor him.
I found myself thinking, as I grappled with my screenplay, what if Barnes and Elias were in the same platoon? They’d be the undisputed alpha leaders. I had my story.
A part of me had gone numb in Vietnam: died, murdered. My story would be about the lies and war crimes which had been committed not just by one platoon, but by many, if not most, combat units there."
On why the main character Chris kills Sgt. Barnes at the end of Platoon:
"In movies, the hero is never supposed to stoop to the level of the villain. And yet in the screenplay I left myself both choices.
And when it came time to shoot the film and edit it a decade later, I did what the brutality in me demanded. I killed Barnes. I killed the bastard because I wanted to.
Why? Because the war had poisoned me. Because a piece of Barnes was in me.
I believe my decision shocked quite a few audiences when the film was finally seen in 1986. Some letters were written calling for my prosecution as a war criminal. The truth, though not admitted by the majority of those who’d served there, was Vietnam had debased us all. Whether we killed or not, we were part of a machine that had been so morally dead as to bomb, napalm, poison this country head to toe, when we knew this was not a real war to defend our homeland. Though there have been many great things that have been accomplished in my country, there is a darkness that still lurks."
Submitted July 12, 2020 at 05:10AM by PM_ME_YOUR_DALEKS https://ift.tt/3emyiHO
