Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (51 page)

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.

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.