Word: dying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like Oliver Stone, Dye is a decorated Viet Nam veteran. His was among the first units to splash ashore there in 1965. Over the next decade, he saw buddies die at such hot spots as Hue and Foxtrot Ridge, and he was wounded three times by rockets and mortar fire. "We fought a hell of a war," he declares, "and until now, Hollywood didn't give a damn about getting it right...
...becomes a witness: that was Oliver Stone reborn. As he scythed his way through the Hollywood jungle, Stone earned the rep of a specialist with a social agenda. Four of the scripts that bear his name -- Midnight Express, Scarface, Year of the Dragon and 8 Million Ways to Die -- cataloged the seductive evils of the drug trade. Stone's third feature as writer-director (after Seizure and, in 1981, The Hand) laced his usual hip rants on pharmacology with a smart, anguished newsphoto montage of one more Third World nation torn by civil war and shadowed by the looming hulk...
Both men are legendary soldiers who have survived long years in Viet Nam -- Elias by a kind of supernal sylvan grace, Barnes by simply refusing to die. Elias is Jesus crossed with Jim Morrison. He will literally take a load off Chris' shoulders, or share a fraternal toke with Chris through the barrel of a rifle, or moon over the night stars, or smile ingenuously at his killer. He is hard to know and harder to destroy, a creature of Stone's wild literary sentiment. Barnes, who says of some fresh corpses, "Tag 'em and bag 'em," has no sentiment...
...horrors of his season in hell, Stone admits he got what he went for, as a budding artist ravenous for material in the raw: "I saw combat at the ground level. I saw people die. I killed. I almost was killed. Almost immediately I realized that combat is totally random. It has nothing to do with heroism. Cowardice and heroism are the same emotion -- fear -- expressed differently. And life is a matter of luck. Two soldiers are standing two feet apart. One gets killed, the other lives. I was never a religious person -- I was raised Protestant, the great compromise...
Roberts' flamboyant fund raising has aroused criticism from secular commentators. A Tulsa radio personality joshed last week that a "900-foot Lassie" had told him to complete a 60-story dog-and-cat hospital and that noncontributors would die. More soberly, the Tribune editorial informed Roberts that his portrayal of a "petty, vengeful or idiotic God" is "close to sacrilege." General Manager David Lane of WFAA-TV, the offended Dallas station, stated that Oral's pitch "violates everything I believe in from a moral standpoint." But a Roberts aide, Jan Dargatz, explained that God has "always given Oral impossible goals...