Word: platoons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...were underfoot, and one two- year-old son was scooting around the toy-strewn rooms of Oliver Stone's French country-style Santa Monica house. The writer-director, who seems capable of doing several things at once, was able to talk to TIME Correspondent Denise Worrell about his pre-Platoon movies and that peculiar state of mind called Hollywood. His comments...
Dino De Laurentiis promised that if I wrote the script for Year of the Dragon, he would produce Platoon. But he backed out because he couldn't get an American distribution deal, and I was in despair. Nothing was coming to me from the studios, and I decided to make a break from Hollywood. Richard Boyle, the guy a lot of the film is based on, was a friend. On the way to the airport one day, he gave me some notes. "Here, you might like this," he said. I read the sketches of his trips to El Salvador...
...Platoon's audience, packing the large theater on a weeknight, still could not quite cope with what they saw. Some cried, some did not. "Nice shooting," laughed one man behind me as Barnes picked off a fleeing civilian. In another scene, Elias runs through the brush, singlehandedly ambushing an enemy squad. "Go, Rambo!" said someone. Eventually, everyone became very quiet...
...office: no one wanted to view our current indiscretions. Although we have come a long way in our intellectual understanding of what happened in Vietnam, there is still a failure to connect the past and the present. Safely enrobed in history, Vietnam cannot hurt us now. Platoon helps to bring it back to the present, to make it real for people who were infants...
Philip Caputo, author of A Rumour of War, commanded a platoon at Danang in 1965. He describes in his book how some of the veterans tried to describe to the inexperienced Marines what it was all about, and how the new recruits refused to listen. "They had already been where we were going, to that frontier between life and death, but none of us wanted to listen to them," Caputo writes. "So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its own war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same illusions, and learn the same...