The Big Picture - 6. I Am Reality | Do We Get to Win This Time?

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Oliver Stone’s harrowing and heartbreaking Vietnam drama ‘Platoon’ becomes a worldwide phenomenon in 1986—and signals the beginning of the Vietnam movie boom. Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Manze, Mike Wargon, Amanda Dobbins, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  All interviews for this series were conducted before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody. Here at The Ringer, we're known for our talk shows, but you might not know we also have a whole slate of great narrative podcasts, all of them made for binging. If you're looking for an unmissable sports history show, you'll love Icons Club. It's a chronicle of the NBA told through the voices of legendary players, whose stories weren't blockbuster movies of their own. If you're a fan of culture podcasts, check out This Blew Up, an investigative story about how social media is inventing an all-new level of stardom. One that's not always as glamorous as it looks. There's also Gamblers, a show about people who make money betting on, well, pretty much anything.

Just don't bet on finding a better podcast about gambling, because you won't win. Thanks for listening. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's the summer of 1985. Ronald Reagan has begun his second term at the White House. John Rambo has just taken over the box office.

And Oliver Stone is miserable. It was a very tough period for me when Rambo came out. Stone had been trying for years to make a film about the event that had changed his life, the Vietnam War. He'd enlisted in the Army in the late 60s, ultimately spending 15 months in Southeast Asia. Stone returned home with multiple decorations, including a bronze star for valor.

But he'd been shaken and angered by his experiences in Vietnam. He'd been part of a battle that left several men dead, including about 25 Americans. And he'd killed a man himself. The whole experience, Stone said decades afterward, left him numb and dumb. Back in the States, Stone struggled to readjust to civilian life. But with the help of the GI Bill, he enrolled at film school at New York University. And in the mid-70s, he poured his combat experiences into a tough screenplay about the heroism and the sins

committed by a group of U.S. soldiers in the jungle. He called it The Platoon. As he'd later write, I wanted to make a document of this forgotten pocket of time. I felt Vietnam was omitted from history books. By the early 80s, Stone was an A-list screenwriter. He'd won an Oscar for the prison thriller Midnight Express. And he'd created the madcap mayhem of Al Pacino's Scarface.

But even after all that, Stone still couldn't get the platoon going. They'd been turned down 25, 30 times by serious people saying, it's not going to make a dime. Then came Rambo First Blood Part II, and the missing in action films. Stone was frustrated by the black and white jingoism these movies were selling. Stories of U.S. troops blazing back into Vietnam, and this time, emerging victorious. That's where the mood was. And it was such a lie, because they were making Americans into tin pod heroes, cowboys and Indians again. That's what was depressing. By 1985, despite his Hollywood

resume, Stone had only directed a pair of movies, both of them unremarkable. He worried he'd never get a chance to tell his Vietnam story, that the platoon would sit unmade forever. My directing career was going nowhere. But within just a year, Stone's luck would change dramatically. After a series of arduous challenges, surprise victories, and one very small movie title change, Stone would emerge in 1986 with Platoon. It was the first in a trilogy of films Stone would direct about the war.

And it remains to this day one of the most resonant Vietnam films of all time. For some Americans, Platoon was a revelation. For others, a release. It was a tsunami of repressed feelings. We don't have to be this phony patriotic stories that we're doing. We don't have to tell lies. Why don't we tell the truth? From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War.

Before Oliver Stone could make platoon, he had to survive Salvador. In the early 80s, Stone became troubled by the increasingly violent situation in the Central American country of El Salvador. The Reagan administration had provided financial aid and military training to the Salvadoran government to help them stomp out communist forces. The results had been bloody,

with civilians being killed by government death squads. To Stone, this all felt uncomfortably familiar. We were really getting into a warlike situation, and now this was a crucial moment in American time for me because I was seeing the same thing I had seen in Vietnam. The same thing. Working with journalist Richard Boyle, who'd spent time on the ground in El Salvador,

Stone began writing a script that took place amid the conflict called Salvador. Stone's hope was to write and direct the movie, a nifty proposition given his track record. By that point, Stone's directing resume was limited to a pair of failed horror films. There was Seizure, starring Fantasy Island's Hervé Villaché

as a mysterious figure named Spider. We know your secret. We read your mind. And The Hand. With Michael Caine as a comic book illustrator who loses a body part, you can probably guess which one. Only to realize it now has a life of its own. A man trapped in a nightmare.

Rocked in the grasp of The Hand. Stone knew it would be hard to convince the studio to give him a chance on Salvador. This would be a grisly political thriller. And like his Vietnam script, it was about yet another civil war many Americans didn't understand. Plus, Stone had a reputation around town for being difficult and outspoken. To some, he was kind of a pain in the ass. But in the 80s, Stone was introduced to a brash English producer named John Daly, who was leading a young independent company called Hemdale.

He was a tough guy, but he didn't believe in any formality about the system. Not surprisingly, the two hit it off. They were both outsiders. Despite his Midnight Express Oscar, Stone had never felt accepted within Hollywood. And Daly was looking for movies that could be produced without the interference of a big studio. He was trying to make the films at a budget, very cheap budget, but he was willing to take chances. And it was like, you know, the independent films that became more famous in the later 80s. But at that time, he was quite original.

So Stone gave Daly two scripts. The first was Salvador. The second was Platoon. Stone had recently come close to pulling off his Vietnam drama. The Deer Hunter's Michael Cimino had expressed interest in producing it. So had the famously bombastic studio exec Dino De Laurentiis.

Both eventually backed away from Platoon, but Stone thought Daly might be drawn to his risky script, and the even riskier idea of letting Stone direct it. He looked at both films, both scripts, and he came back to me and he said, Oliver, I'd like them both. I want to make them both. Which ones do you want to do first? This is not a question directors hear a whole lot. Stone had to make a tough choice. And because he felt protective of Platoon, and because he wanted some more on-the-ground directing experience, he decided to go with Salvador first. Listen, you know, I think it's going to blow in El Salvador real soon.

I thought if you guys could get me a new press card for two grand, I could get you some really good stuff. What do you say? The movie starred James Woods as Boyle, the journalist who's hoping to cash in on the chaos in El Salvador by grabbing some freelance work, only to find himself caught up in the country's political turmoil. The film's brutality and bloodshed mostly take place in Central America, but Salvador gave Stone a chance to unleash

some of his long-simmering frustrations about Vietnam. Like in this scene, in which Boyle gets into a verbal firefight with a pair of U.S. military bureaucrats. They've just told him America needs to Like in this scene, in which Boyle gets into a verbal firefight with a pair of U.S. military bureaucrats. They've just told him America needs to be in El Salvador, that we need to stomp out communism before it takes over. Boyle erupts. He's seen this all before. You pour 120 million bucks into this place, you turn it into a military zone, so what, so you can have chopper parades in the sky? You're blowing it out your ass, boy. All you're doing is bringing misery to these people, Jack. I don't want to see another Vietnam. A few years ago, in his memoir, Chasing the Light,

Stone detailed the nightmare of making Salvador in Mexico. The account goes on for dozens of pages, and it's absolutely fucking bananas. I mean, it's wild how hard it was to make this movie. Just reading about Stone's hour-by-hour stress load will give you panic attacks. He had money people breathing down his neck. He had James Woods screaming at his co-stars. I mean, he had James Woods, period. And he had to deal with an on-set incident he casually describes as, quote, a bazooka mishap on a rooftop. But Salvador, for all its behind-the-scenes headaches, turned out to be an unexpected success.

For one thing, it earned multiple Oscar nominations, as well as the respect of some of Stone's most begrudging critics. After years in Hollywood, he was finally being taken seriously as a filmmaker, a guy whose name now appeared on movie marquees. More importantly,

Salvador gave Stone a crash course on how to pull off a low-cost, high-pressure production. It was a classic training ground baptism for me as a director. It was Salvador that made Platoon possible, as Daly kept his promise to Stone and agreed to finance the director's

longtime obsession. It was a big show of faith, but a financially cautious one. Stone would get $6.5 million to shoot Platoon in the Philippines. It was enough, but just barely. We had a very tight schedule. It was 54 days long.

Stone didn't have much money or time, but he did have a remarkable script. From the moment Stone began writing Platoon back in the mid-70s, he knew who he'd use as inspiration for its lead character, himself. The film starts in the fall of 1967,

as a baby-faced Army volunteer named Chris Taylor steps off a plane and into the madness of Vietnam. Taylor is a privileged but troubled kid whose father and grandfather are veterans. He's hoping Vietnam will let him define himself. These are all traits he had in common with Stone, who saw Taylor as his alter ego. When the director was asked to explain why he chose to go to Vietnam, Stone gave a very Taylor-like answer. I wanted to prove I was a man. In the early 80s, when he was first trying to get Platoon going, Stone had found the perfect actor for Taylor. He was handsome, boyish, and quietly intense.

And, in a neat bit of cinematic symmetry, he happened to be the son of Apocalypse Now star Martin Sheen. His name? Emilio Estevez. But the delays in making Platoon meant that, by the time cameras were ready to roll, Stone went with Estevez's three years younger brother, Charlie Sheen. Though Sheen had spent time with his dad on the set of Apocalypse Now, he was just a little

kid during the actual Vietnam War. As Sheen told interviewer John C. Tibbetts in 1986, many people his age had only a passing knowledge of a war that had defined their parents' generation. But you're about 21, right? I am 21, yeah. So people your age, do they know much about Vietnam and your own experience? Yeah, to a certain extent, what they teach you in history in high school, which is a very dubious version. You know, they want to let you know that we won the war when we didn't, you know. This interview, by the way, is peak Sheen in the 80s. He's got a cigarette in his hand and a semi-sleepy expression on his face.

But unlike the cocky wise guy persona he'd inhabited throughout this decade, both on and off screen, Sheen's character in Platoon is quiet and observant. The only insight we get into his state of mind comes via the letters he writes to his grandmother back home. The unwritten rule is a new guy's life isn't worth as much because he hasn't put his time in yet. And they say if you're going to get killed in the NOM,

it's better to get it in the first few weeks. The logic being, you don't suffer that much. Taylor isn't the only platoon character drawn from Stone's own life. The Grunson platoon have two de facto leaders, both based on men Stone knew in Vietnam.

Their Staff Sergeant Barnes, played by Tom Barringer, could recently come off the hit dramedy The Big Chill, in which he played a nice guy TV star. For Platoon, though, Stone decided to turn Berenger into the bad guy. Barnes is a fatalistic hard-ass who's been literally and figuratively scarred by his experiences in Vietnam, and who's now fighting by his own rules. At one point in Platoon, in an effort to remind his men who's in charge, Barnes pays an unexpected visit to the grunts' barracks-slash-opium den. Y'all know about killing?

I'd like to hear about it, potheads. You just want this shit so as to escape from reality. Yeah, I don't need this shit. Barnes paces around their quarters, swinging from a bottle of whiskey as the men stay quiet. I am reality. Barnes' rival is the thoughtful Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe.

Once again, Stone was flipping moviegoers' expectations. Dafoe had recently played the sinister counterfeiter in the grimy To Live and Die in L.A. But in Platoon, Defoe would play a caring, almost paternal good guy. It's Elias who helps Taylor survive his early days in the jungle, while also schooling him on the realities of their war. In one scene, after a terrifying day of fighting, Taylor and Elias keep watch under the stars. Elias tells the young grunt that he used to believe in America's role in Vietnam, but that he's come to see the whole thing as a failure.

What happened today is just the beginning. We're going to lose this war. Taylor can't believe what he's hearing, but Elias doubles down. We've been kicking other people's asses for so long, I figure it's time we got ours kicked. In real life, the two men whom Stone used as inspiration for Barnes and Elias never met. But in Platoon, the two characters clash after a violent encounter in a Vietnamese village. Halfway through a failed interrogation, an out-of-control Barnes kills a woman and then points a gun at a young girl's head.

He's close to pulling the trigger when Elias confronts him. What the fuck do you think you're doing? As Taylor and the rest of the men look on helplessly, Elias heads straight to Barnes, who lets the girl go. Stay out of this, Elias. This ain't your show. You ain't a fighter in this squad, you piece of shit! Give her! Give her! The two men fight before the others break it up.

Once the dust has cleared, the soldiers burn the village, and Taylor stops a few of his platoon mates from sexually assaulting two young women. It's a devastating sequence, one that recalls the 1968 massacre in My Lai, and it demonstrates what would set Platoon apart from so many previous Vietnam films. Apocalypse Now is an operatic swirl of madness. The deer hunter encapsulates the brutality of war in a disturbing game of Russian roulette. But the physical and emotional violence of Platoon is messy and abrupt. Even in its quietest moments, Platoon never lets up.

It was a relentless film and told the way that I saw it at the eye level, at the grunts level. I was in the infantry for those 15 months in Vietnam. And, you know, it was just the inside view, the worm's eye view of how miserable it can be. To find those grunts, Stone met with countless actors over the years. Bruce Willis, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Costner, they all passed through Stone's office. So did Keanu Reeves, who at one point was up for the Chris Taylor role, only to pass because, according to Stone, the film was too violent for him. When it came to Platoon's grunts,

Stone was looking for the kind of kids he'd met during his own time in Vietnam. Young guys from all over America. The kind of kids Taylor describes early on in the film. They're poor. They're the unwanted. Yet they're fighting for our society and our freedom. It's weird, isn't it? They're the bottom of the barrel, and they know it. And in Platoon, they'd be played by unknowns with big careers ahead of them.

Actors like Forrest Whitaker, Johnny Depp, John C. McGinley, Kevin Dillon, and Corey Glover, then the lead singer of a soon-to-be-huge New York City band named Living Color. But there were also a few older soldiers within the ranks of the platoon. Men who had just a few years on the new guys, but who had what felt like a lifetime of experience. Men like King, played by Keith David. When Taylor is at his bleakest, it's King who brings him back to reality. We just don't add up to dry shit.

Whoever said we did, man? All you got to do is make it out of here. And it's all gravy. Every day, the rest of your life, gravy. David was 30 by the time of Platoon's release. Old enough to have followed the news about Vietnam as a teenager in New York City in the late 60s and early 70s,

and to have seen the impact of the war, and of previous American wars, on the people around him. I had friends who were drafted, and I had a cousin who was drafted, and none of them came back. It was like my stepfather was in World War II, and he never talked about it.

One of the few stories his stepfather did tell David took place in the Philippines. He went for a swim in the ocean with four other men. One of them didn't return, for reasons no one ever learned. That incident came up unexpectedly one day, when David and his uncle went to the beach. Him and I went swimming out, and a piece of seaweed latched itself onto his ankle and he freaked out.

I mean, just the look on his face and just, and he didn't want to talk about it, but it reminded him of that, of that fifth guy who didn't, who didn't return. I had other uncles who were in the war. An uncle who was in World War I. The stories that I get and read about, it's not necessarily something that you do want to recall. Years later, David and the rest of the platoon cast would try to understand what it was like to be plunged into combat. Before filming began, Stone would put his actors through the closest proxy for war that he could manufacture,

a Vietnam movie boot camp of sorts. He wanted to send him to hell, and he found just the man to lead him there. As a teenager in small-town Missouri, Dale Dye took a lot of dates to the local movie theater. The girls generally did not want to go see the movies I wanted to see. Dye came of age in the 50s and early 60s, right as the studios were making dozens of films about World War II. Films like John Wayne's The Sands of Iwo Jima, one of Dye's favorites.

But while he wound up seeing plenty of military films, he didn't think of any of them as particularly realistic. I think I was smart enough to know better. And I was certainly smart enough to know that not everything one does in uniform or in the military is going to be great and courageous and so on and so forth. But I was also a fan of any military movie that gave me a little perception or a little look behind the curtain.

Dye enrolled in military school, and in 1964, he joined the United States Marine Corps. He soon found himself in Vietnam, where he spent most of the late 60s, returning home with three purple hearts. Over the next several years, Dye traveled the world, reaching the rank of captain before retiring from the Marines in 1984. And he kept going to the movies. I think at some point in my life, after about 20 years in uniform, I had seen virtually every military movie there was. And the vast majority of them sort of pissed me off. Dye was frustrated when a movie got the little details wrong. He hated seeing an on-screen soldier wearing the wrong uniform or carrying the wrong gun.

But he was even more annoyed by Hollywood's portrayal of life in the military. What I felt was missing was how we relate to each other, who we are, who we are as people, what's in our mind, in our hearts, and in our guts. And I said, they just miss that completely. They don't get us. Soon, Dye found himself in Hollywood, looking to start a new career as a technical advisor, someone who could school filmmakers and actors about the realities of being a soldier. He hustled his way around Los Angeles, trying to find a foothold in the movie industry, and pitching his idea to anybody who'd listen.

I was the guy who hung around movie lots until they got thrown off by the security forces. And I just wasn't doing very well. After nearly a year, he was ready to give up. But one day, while reading the industry trades, Dye saw a news item about Oliver Stone's Vietnam film. After a lot of badgering, Dye managed to land a five-minute meeting with Stone,

who was taking a break from editing Salvador. We sniffed each other like a couple of strange dogs, and I had checked each other's bona fides. A few days later, Stone called Dye back and told him he had a plan. He was going to give Dye a bunch of actors. And what I want you to do is to take them into the mountains of the Philippines, and I want you to train them in such a manner that they live exactly as we lived when we were 19-year-old kids. In later years, Dye would prepare actors with military training for such films as Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, and The Thin Red Line. But at the time of Platoon, it was an almost unheard of idea. And, not surprisingly, a controversial one.

A few of the actors Stone drafted for Platoon were so opposed to the boot camp, they dropped out of the movie altogether. Those who stayed soon found themselves in the middle of a two-week nightmare, as Di and a team of fellow veterans subjected them to all manner of torture in the jungle. So what was a typical day like? What did you put them through? Well, you name it, I put them through it.

The actors learned how to handle and clean real guns. They humped gear for miles. They kept watch at night, at which point the others might ambush them, firing weapons loaded with blanks. Stone himself showed up once at three in the morning, setting off explosions around his actors while pretending to be part of a North Vietnamese attack squad. The activity quickly took its toll on the cast members, who suffered amp bites, mysterious fevers, even machete injuries. And because the actors could only consume pre-packaged food in the form of MREs, which stands for meal, ready to eat, many of them became constipated for days, shedding pounds along the way. It wasn't really war, but it was hellish.

And it was 24 hours a day, by the way. They slept two hours, maybe, if they didn't piss me off that day. And they ate maybe twice, again, if they didn't piss me off that day. In addition to putting the cast members through grueling physical tasks, Dye wanted them to learn to think like a soldier. He led the actors in a daily exercise he called Stand Down, in which they grilled him with questions about military life. It could be weird things. How do you take a dump in the field? Well, here's how you do it. What does it feel like to be hit by a shrapnel? What does it feel like to be hit by a bullet? What I found was that they were assimilating this. They were soaking it up like sponges. In a 1986 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,

Sheen reflected on how those two weeks affected the cast. We didn't realize when we were going through it at the time how valuable that information was going to be until we got on film. Because we didn't have to think about a lot of the stuff that we learned. It just became subconscious. You just reacted, you know? I asked Keith David about those two weeks in the jungle. I came to understand

what it meant to be part of a well-oiled machine, to be one with your fellows, to be a unit. It came to understand how, you know, there does come a point where, you know, you can hate me if you want to, white boy, but we are in this foxhole together. Earlier in his life,

David had felt a patriotic urge to go to war. My father at the time was willing to send me to Canada. My father was very militant in those days. He was just very pro-Black. And he didn't think that we should be fighting in that war since we didn't have those freedoms at home. And, I mean, I understood that. I felt torn because, you know, it's my country and all that stuff. But by the time David made it to the Philippines for platoon,

his feelings about America's role in Vietnam and in the world had shifted. The boot camp experience only deepened his own cynicism about the war. I still have a great allegiance to my country, but I also understand that my country is not as right as they pretend to be. I asked David, why has thinking changed? I turned 30 in platoon. And it wasn't until then that I realized significantly how much we'd been lied to. It wasn't until then when I actually was on site and, you know,

training like a soldier that I realized all the politics involved in war and the indoctrination that it takes to be a soldier. One of the things that in your soldier training, it wants to weed out your humanity because it's very hard to kill somebody who you don't know. That's what wars are built on. Once his actors emerged from the jungle, Stone threw them straight into the chaos of Platoon. He was anxious to get to work. I marched through this film like an Iron Man.

Salvador had prepared Stone for the headaches of low-budget filmmaking, but Platoon presented its own set of challenges. Like Francis Ford Coppola before him, Stone had tried to secure equipment and support from the U.S. military, only to be turned down. Here he is in 1987, talking to interviewer Bobby Wygant. Do you have any idea of our Defense Department, their reaction to it? They hated it. You know, they said the script was wholly unrealistic. They said this depiction of the drug usage was, there was no drugs, there was no black-white problems, there was none of this and that. Instead, Stone would get support from the government in the

Philippines, where shooting was set to begin in March 1986, not long before the rainy season. If Stone went over schedule, he'd be in trouble. If we'd continued on, we worried that we would have the same problems Coppola had had in the Philippines with apocalypse. When he got into rainy season, he got killed, lost a fortune. The political forecast in the Philippines was even more troubling. A few weeks before filming was set to start, President Ferdinand Marcos was declared the winner in an election that many observers, including Ronald Reagan, believed to have been fixed. Protesters took to the streets in what became known as the People Power Revolution.

The images of tanks rolling down city streets were broadcast on American News, and Stone received calls from some of the actor's parents, concerned about their kids' safety. For a brief moment, it seemed the film might be canceled altogether. The situation de-escalated when Marcos' opponent, Corazon Aquino, was named president, and Marcos himself fled the country. Platoon would start filming in March 1986, just as planned. But things did not go smoothly. Everything was breaking down at some point. Cars, vehicles, getting into the jungle, rain. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was worse.

The day shoots with their suffocating humidity and high temperatures, or the night shoots with their hordes of red ants and mosquitoes. Another source of frustration? Constant delays with the local crew. At one point, more than 30 days into filming, Stone became irate when a cherry picker was moved against his wishes. He literally kicked a production manager's butt, prompting a temporary strike among the crew. Stone later apologized, but it wasn't his only outburst on the platoon set,

where emotions often ran high. Stone could be tough on his actors. When Sheen refused to remove his shirt for a scene next to a helicopter to avoid being hit by debris, the director berated him in public. What, are you a pussy? Are you a little pussy from Malibu? And when they weren't fighting with Stone, the actors sometimes butted heads with each other.

Their training had instilled a sense of camaraderie. But when you have dozens of guys thrown together in a pressurized environment like Platoon, blow-ups are inevitable. There was some cast tension when you're with that many people. Everybody don't have to like each other. As a matter of fact, I don't give a shit whether you like me

or not. But what I do demand is respect. You can't disrespect me. Platoon was a high-stress shoot all around. Remember, Stone had less than two months to recreate the chaos of Vietnam, which he did with exacting precision. The red dust that swirled around during the day scenes?

It had been imported directly from Vietnam. And when Stone ran into a group of wealthy Vietnamese-Americans from South Carolina on vacation in the Philippines, he hired them on the spot to play peasants in the village scene. Most viewers would barely notice these small details, but to Stone, these were make-or-break elements of Platoon. He knew veterans would be watching, and he wanted their experiences in Vietnam to be reflected on screen. For Dye, that level of realism could be eerie. There were times, certainly for me, times when it was too close and I had to back away from it for a minute and remind myself what I was doing. One night, while filming an ambush scene in the jungle, things got especially surreal. I always kept a loaded rifle next to me so that in case I needed to use the

scene, I could fire a few rounds in the air loaded with blanks. But on that night, Dye was exhausted, the result of endless 18-hour-long shifts. He fell asleep sitting up, his rifle propped between his legs. By the time I woke up, it was just at that moment when those two North Vietnamese soldiers came through the bush. And I immediately shouldered my rifle. And Oliver Reeshot got a hold of me. And I, oh, okay, I know what I'm doing now. But it was close. I would have shot somebody or shot at somebody.

That intensity would pay off in the film's combat scenes. In Platoon, the jungle is a madhouse, a place where bullets can zip through the foliage at any moment, and where the grass seemingly explodes at random. It's also the site of one of the film's most shocking narrative twists. After their fight in the village earlier in the film, Barnes realizes Elias is going to report him for murder. So he tracks down Elias in the village earlier in the film, Barnes realizes Elias is going to report him for murder. So he tracks down Elias in the jungle, and knowing no one's watching, shoots him repeatedly.

But that's not enough to kill Elias. Moments later, as their helicopter takes off, Taylor watches as Elias runs toward the departing vehicle, only to be shot by Vietnamese soldiers. That final image of Elias, his arms stretched upwards, his head tilted back at the sky in slow motion, became the defining image of Platoon. It may be the defining image of Vietnam movies, period. A single moment that conveys years worth of anguish and exhaustion. Dafoe talked about filming that scene in an interview with Yahoo in 2021. For me, it's really, you know, it was a purely physical thing.

And the gesture of reaching towards the heaven, that's not something we talked about. It's purely practical. The helicopter's up there, you want to reach for it. Taylor knows Barnes was responsible for Elias's death, and he gets his revenge toward the end of the film, when the young grunt finds Barnes alone and shoots him point blank. By then, the innocence Taylor once maintained has curdled into pure instinctive fury. On his helmet, he's written the words, Bury me upside down so the world can kiss my ass.

Still, Platoon's final moments do allow Taylor a moment of quiet clarity. While being choppered out of the jungle, the beginning of his long trip back home, Taylor stares down at a pile of bodies. As Samuel Barber's soaring classical piece Adagio for Strings plays in the background, Taylor reflects on what he experienced in Vietnam. I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but I will always be there the rest of my days.

These were, of course, Stone's words. The memories of a veteran who could never let go of Vietnam. Or of his Vietnam movie. Stone had his own epiphany on the final day of filming Platoon. After the last shot was completed, right before daybreak, Stone sat in the back of a car, his face pressed against the glass as he stared out at the landscape around him. His journey back to the war was over, for now.

It was the greatest peace I'd had since Vietnam in terms of I'd achieved something I knew would have resonance. I didn't know it would be a huge hit, but I felt, God, this feels good, this feels right. This feels right. And I drove across the paddy fields coming back to the hotel after a long, long night. And it was just one of the best feelings of my life. Platoon opened in limited release in December 1986 and immediately became a word-of-mouth hit. One movie theater in Times Square had lines of people waiting all day and night in the middle of winter just to get a look at Stone's film. Unbelievably packed houses from day one, and it continued and it continued.

As they say in the business, they were leaving money on the table because they just didn't have enough theaters for Christmas and all that and New Year's, but they kept adding theaters. Platoon took everyone by surprise. The biggest hit of 1986 had been Top Gun, a flag-wrapped ode to U.S. military might that was shot like a music video and sold like Pepsi. Platoon was something entirely different, a muddy, violent, emotionally shattering account of what happens when a country loses its way.

And it was introduced to moviegoers not through some megabucks marketing campaign, but via word of mouth. Newspaper ads for Platoon featured a black-and-white shot of Defoe's character reaching up to the sky, surrounded by enthusiastic reviews like, This is the one you must not miss. And commercials for Platoon opened with a strikingly youthful photo of Stone, taken during his time in the war In 1967, Oliver Stone was a soldier in Vietnam Ten years later, his screenplay for Midnight Express won the Academy Award

Stone has come a long way from Vietnam But he has not left it behind In the past, some studios have tried to sell their Vietnam movies by toning down any mentions of the war, or ignoring it altogether. But the promotional blitz for Platoon put Vietnam front and center. The first real movie about the war in Vietnam is Platoon. That message was echoed in a Platoon cover story in Time magazine,

with a headline that read, Vietnam as it really was. Inside, Pulitzer-winning journalist David Halberstam, who'd covered the war extensively and was considered by many to be a Vietnam scholar, gave the movie a prophetic endorsement. He wrote, I think the film will become an American classic. 30 years from now, people will think of the Vietnam War as Platoon. For Stone, the attention was overwhelming. It was an unbelievable experience for me. And it was a vindication that I was, in some way, had done something right

because I was telling my truth and people could tell the truth. Thanks to Stone's raw filmmaking, not to mention the intense, hard-won performances from the cast, Platoon would have attracted attention no matter when it was released. But in early 1987, the timing for the movie shot it straight into the zeitgeist. The memorial wall was just a few years old, and still attracting millions of visitors. And Ronald Reagan was invoking Vietnam from the White House. That year, he announced a national POW-MIA Day of Recognition.

Platoon hit every generation of moviegoers. Younger Americans wanted to learn about Vietnam, and older Americans were finally ready to talk about it, especially those Americans who'd served. On a Sunday afternoon that winter, a retired Marine general named Bernard E. Traynor went to see platoon with his wife and three daughters. Traynor had done multiple tours in Vietnam, and as he sat through platoon, which he admired, Traynor remained composed. But as the movie ended,

and Traynor stood and put on his coat, he caught the film's final on-screen message, dedicated to those who fought and died in Vietnam. Traynor stood and put on his coat, he caught the film's final on-screen message, dedicated to those who fought and died in Vietnam. Traynor froze. The line hit him hard. While his family went to the parking lot, he decided to take a long, solitary walk. He realized how long he'd kept his Vietnam experiences to himself. As he later wrote in the New York Times, For 15 years I have been keeping an anguished genie bottled up inside of me. He nearly escaped. I quickly put the cork back in the bottle that

afternoon, but he's still there trying to get out. It was a feeling shared by many of the veterans who saw Platoon. There was this layer of ice between the veterans, the Vietnam veterans, and the public that they serve. And so what I discovered was a film like Platoon can melt that ice. At one point during the film's promotional tour, Dye and Stone appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Unbeknownst to them, Winfrey had invited several veterans to attend the taping. Afterward, Dye spoke with them about the feelings that had been kicked up by Platoon. What I discovered from them, from the

audience, was that this was their only opportunity after the cold reception they'd gotten after they got home. This was the only opportunity for them to explain to people why they didn't want to talk about it. Those who were ready to talk about Vietnam sometimes had these conversations with the film's cast. I asked Keith David about that. Were you approached by veterans? Many times. What was their reaction like? They were, you know, wonderfully moved because, you know, we here in America and propagandistic America, we're all used to John Wayne's America, which we know was just a damn lie and oversimplification and over glorification. I love Oliver as a filmmaker because, you know, what he goes after, he's always going after a level of truth that is not the most popular. There are truths that come out that, you know, are not always pretty.

Those truths resonated with some of the veterans David has met during the last few decades. One particular encounter still stays with the actor. I was once walking down the street and a veteran walked up to me and says, listen, excuse me, I don't want to bother you. I just want you to know that I was in the 365th of 1967 and I know you. I mean, I wept. I mean, I was like, wow. And that has happened to me more than once when somebody, you know, has come up and says, I know you, I know that guy. But there were moviegoers who took issue with Platoon, including some veterans.

At one event in Manhattan, Stone was confronted by a former patrol leader about the behavior depicted in Platoon. The attempted sexual assaults, the drug use, he claimed Stone had made it all up. Other veterans were upset by the movie's violence, most notably the scene in which the Platoon grunts terrorized the Vietnamese village. People thought I should be prosecuted as a war crimes guy, because if I'd seen these war crimes that they were committed in the village, they thought that I had been part of it, that I'd killed my own sergeant. There was all these accusations, you know.

To some, Platoon felt like an indictment of American troops as a whole. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz called the film repellent and said Platoon, quote, blackens the name and belittles the sacrifice of every man and woman who served. And Chuck Norris told the press, my brother died in Vietnam. I think he would be angry at what this movie says about our soldiers.

But during his interview with Bobby Wygant, Stone insisted he'd witnessed that violence up close, that he'd seen it in his own platoons. I'm not saying that we did this on a concentrated basis. At random, when the frustration hit us, sometimes we turned it on the agents. There was a heavy element of racism. Stone was on the defensive throughout platoon's release.

There was an attempt to debunk his military record. When a group of veterans couldn't find official service records for someone named Oliver Stone, they began a grassroots effort to discredit him. It ended when they realized he'd served as William Stone, and that Oliver was his middle name. But the controversies and non-troversies stirred by Platoon couldn't slow down the film's cultural momentum. And on February 12, 1987, the same day Platoon was number one in theaters, Stone's movie picked up eight Academy Award nominations,

including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for both Barringer and Defoe. You might remember that Oscar ceremony. The one with that tacky opening song. If you figured the Academy would never be so low as to incorporate a grim Vietnam drama into a ridiculous musical number, well, you're wrong. Stone's movie won the night, with Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as statues for editing and sound. The 1987 Academy Awards would go down as the Platoon Oscars.

Here's Stone at the end of the evening, accepting his Best Director trophy. Thank you. Thank you for this Cinderella ending. That night, with tens of millions watching at home, Stone told the Academy members that, by acknowledging Platoon, they were also acknowledging what happened in Vietnam. A war that had once existed, as Stone said, in a forgotten pocket of time. And one that should never happen again.

And if it does, then those American boys died over there for nothing. Because America learned nothing from the Vietnam War. To this day, Platoon remains one of the most successful films ever made about Vietnam, commercially, critically, culturally. It proved that Americans were willing to open their eyes and their minds to a painful truth about a war that had split their country apart. It also demonstrated that there was an appetite for more Vietnam. In bookstores, on primetime TV,

and especially in movie theaters. The Vietnam boom was about to begin. In the next episode... It was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare. This is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Written and reported by me, Brian Raftery.

The executive producers are Bill Simmons, Juliet Littman, and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Amanda Dobbins. Produced by Devin Manzi, Mike Wargon, and Bikram Patel. Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Thanks for listening.