Word: stoning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once Dye had the cast thoroughly sore-footed and stinking, Stone began filming, without a break, and continued for nine straight weeks. "They looked mean," Stone says, "and they stayed that way." Roaming the sets, Dye ensured the authenticity of every detail, from Barnes' wicked dagger ("Worn upside-down for quicker killing," Dye explains) to the proper use of white plastic C-ration spoons. No one said "Over and out" on the field radio, and no one wore camouflage fatigues, which came into use after the period depicted by the film...
...politics, not surprisingly, are fervently anti-Communist: between his retirement from the Marines in 1984 and his move to Hollywood a year later, he edited Soldier of Fortune magazine and unofficially trained Nicaraguan contras. Good-humored political arguments raged between Dye and Stone, who called each other "John Wayne" and "the Bolshevik." Dye is not concerned that many, including Stone, see Platoon as an antiwar film: "My hope is that it will encourage America not to waste its soldiers' lives in wars that it is not willing or able to win." That theme is further explored...
...Oliver Stone sprang up in bed and found fear staining his sheets. A dream had startled him awake. He was 16 years out of Viet Nam, but in the dream, "they had shipped me back. Somehow they found me at the age of 38 and sent me back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror." That was two years ago. Now Stone, who earned a Bronze Star and a MASH unit's worth of physical and emotional wounds in the jungles of Viet Nam, has transformed his war experience -- the bad dream he lived through for 15 months...
Welcome to the old nightmare -- the one neither Stone nor the 2.7 million American soldiers who went to Viet Nam can shake. Welcome back to the war that, just 20 years ago, turned America schizophrenic. Suddenly we were a nation split between left and right, black and white, hip and square, mothers and fathers, parents and children. For a nation whose war history had read like a John Wayne war movie -- where good guys finish first by being tough and playing fair -- the polarization was soul-souring. Americans were fighting themselves, and both sides lost...
Platoon pushes the metaphor further, thousands of miles away from the "world," into the combat zones of Nam. Platoon says that American soldiers -- the young men we sent there to do our righteous dirty work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center...