Looking, I suppose, for a thread to anything, I started to peck away at a story based on my memories of January 1, 1968. What had I really remembered of that battle except the bodies and the fireworks? Eight years ago was a long time—details, faces were blurring. Ten screenplays and maybe five real-time years of my ass connected to a chair—and nothing to show for it. This story might possibly speak some truth about our failure in Vietnam because it’d be bigger than just “miserable old me.” A first draft shouldn’t take so long, or I’d end up like a crazed Robert Bolt, researching and writing for years. Cut your losses. As I understood Norman Mailer’s directive on writing, we are governed by a secret pact to do it each day, to store and carry the residue of the previous day into our unconscious, to sleep on it, and then continue that mindset through the next day. It’s a rhythm you don’t break, and if you do, you wasted your preparation, never to be regained the same way.
After leaving Najwa, I moved into a friend’s third-floor walkup for almost a year. It was like living at a YMCA—a small, shabby room overlooking the rumble of trucks day and night down Second Avenue. I was happy here in my little room, no obligations, no rent to pay. My friend Danny Jones, in his forties, a divorced five-foot-five Englishman of sardonic wit and generous heart, held a stable and creative job as an art director at a top New York advertising agency, but he also had a huge appetite for drugs and alcohol and, like many New Yorkers, was living every two weeks from paycheck to paycheck. Being a bachelor again with an eccentric host, I found the gloom of George Orwell’s poverty was dispelled, and I discovered a side of New York no cab driver would ever find on his map, the world of Henry Miller’s 1930s Paris, transposed to 1970s New York—an underdream of aspiring musicians, filmmakers, actresses and models, photographers, artists of all stripes, Wall Street hustlers, Park Avenue heiresses, divorcées, widows, teachers, nurses, doctors selling speed, drug dealers, immigrants, all new, all on the make. Every night turned into an adventure; waking up in different places, I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun in my life, maybe because being young and single is more fun without money, and maybe because the only thing money can’t buy is poverty. Money gives you an edge, but without it, you become more human. In some ways it was like being back in the infantry, with a grunt’s worm’s-eye view. Everything is seen by looking up. Every gift, every kindness is appreciated as much as any dollar.
Sometimes, for the majority of the day I’d walk alone through the streets, exploring or dreaming. There was unemployment money, but that eventually ran out. And I felt no guilt at being a bum, not responsible to my father, or Robert Bolt, or anybody. I still felt destined for higher things, but was enjoying, day by day, the rent-free shelter given me by an older Falstaff in return for my collaboration with him on two promising screenplays. Let me add that with his remarkable Celtic constitution, Danny went to work each morning sober, as I would write up our ideas at his tiny kitchen table. But this writer’s journey of hope and heartbreak does not bear repeating, except to say that I was now totally responsible for myself, and since I’d gone on this unique journey, I knew I was going to the very end of my talent—if I had any.
But after six months, our co-written screenplays were languishing in purgatory, and I sensed nothing was going to happen with them—again. “Nothing” is the most frustrating feeling in the world. Nothing. After that Fourth of July night, I began writing alone again, quickly in longhand, three pages here, four pages there, building a muscle of memory mixed with some imagination. I called it simply “The Platoon.”
War in reality is dull. So much boredom and dead time. Spiritual death too. A realistic version of my time in four different units, three of them combat platoons, would not make an interesting movie, and I was a screenwriter by this time, even if without success; I had at least gotten to know the form and the feel for it. The movie culture by the ’70s was moving off the success of Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider in 1969 in a neo-realistic, antiheroic direction. Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Bob De Niro, Al Pacino, and Women’s Liberation were contradicting the traditional roles movie heroes and heroines had played. Nonetheless, movies had historically, to my mind, stood for action, spectacle, resonance—above all, a feeling that life had a meaning. Even failure had a meaning. And now I had to find meaning in that shitty little war if I was going to write a movie about it.
I didn’t want it to be an allegory like “Break,” my 1969 effort to deal with Vietnam. This was not going to be just about me—it would be about all of us who went on that journey without an ending. It was not hippies or college boys but lost working-class men whose future in contemporary America would be increasingly bleak. And I’d be the observer, if such exists. My alter ego in the script would be Chris Taylor—an anodyne white Protestant name for a young man who volunteered and just wanted to be anonymous over there. After all, in the army I’d resorted to using, as in boarding school and the merchant marine, my official baptismal name, William. My middle name, which my parents settled on—Oliver—was too effete and European for rougher American accents. So Chris would have no family history to haunt his flesh, and there’d be a distant but obviously important grandmother to whom he writes letters from the battlefield:
Well, here I am—anonymous alright, with guys no one really cares about—they come from the end of the line, most of ’em towns you’ve never heard of—Pulaski, Tennessee, Brandon, Mississippi, Pork Bend, Utah . . . Two years’ high school’s about it, maybe if they’re lucky a job waiting for them back in a factory, but most of them got nothing, they’re poor . . . they’re the backbone of this country, grandma, the best I’ve ever seen, the heart and soul . . . I found it, finally, way down here in the mud—maybe from down here I can start up again and be something I can be proud of, without having to fake it.
This would be a movie with young men who looked older than their years, not men in their thirties and forties playing young GIs like in many Hollywood war movies. It’d be a dirty war, as it was—men who rarely slept, their nerves bent out of proportion, jumpy, hateful, playing to some of their baser instincts of racism, white, black, and yellow. And at its worst, it’d be about murder most foul, as in a Greek drama. But their faces would be pure rural or inner-city American. It’d be a modest, low-down grubby movie, but with a venomous sting.
Watching antiwar demonstrations in New York brought up a fury and contradiction in myself over something in the American air that was so deeply hypocritical; we marched for peace but somehow wanted war, wanted to release its aggression. After all, I’d wanted to go, hadn’t I? And I felt again the pure futility of my quest, alongside that of our expeditionary army. I was back in The Iliad with those Greeks camping on the shores outside the walls of Troy, with the divisive bickering and feuds. Like the Greeks, I felt, the Americans had great hubris embodied by an undeserved arrogance of victory left over from World War II. As our “Dr. Strangelove,” Henry Kissinger, summed up the problem, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like Vietnam does not have a breaking point.” We were so proud, and then, when we couldn’t achieve victory, we had to lie like we all do when we deny what we know is true—that we lost, and lost big-time, and all those technology-loving Pentagon warriors were at last revealed as failures, and those determined little Vietnamese had licked us. So America came up with its “Peace with Honor” public relations campaign, and then later intensified it with its “Bring Home Our Missing POWs” mission to mask the Vietnamese denial of our will to win. Never lose, never. This exceptionalism was stamped all over the arrogance of Patton, embodied by George C. Scott in the hit movie of 1970. The horrible truth was Americans loved this Patton, the movie and the man, a sick man who’d gone too far. We loved killers. Why was I raised seeing killers on almost every TV show? Isn’t that why I made Natural Born Killers later in life—to show that madness in our culture?
In my script, I’d model my alter ego on Odysseus, the wanderer struggling to find his way home. A young man without identifying traits beyond a vague educated-class status who goes innocently into hell and comes out the other side—a man darkened by his experience. I’d read Edith Hamilton and Robert Graves and loved the actions and fates of the multiple characters that appeared in Greek myth, which had essentially disappeared from our culture. That’s why Professor Tim Leahy at NYU, whose class I’d taken outside the film school, struck lightning with me in a classical drama course; he’d rage about the fate of Odysseus.
“Why,” he’d thunder, “did Odysseus alone return to Penelope after nearly twenty years? Why him of all the heroes that went off to Troy?”
He waited for his answer—silence. “Nine years! On the beaches at Troy, and nine more years returning to Ithaca. No one else in his crew made it home. Why? Why Odysseus?
“Consciousness!” he wrote, as his fist banged the chalkboard, his voice carrying. “Because he had consciousness,” he repeated. “That, people, is what kept him alive. That’s the difference between each one of us—how conscious can you remain in this hard world? How often do we forget because we . . . what? We want to —” He banged the board where he’d written the word “LETHE” in big block letters. “Sleep! Lethe. Forgetfulness.” In the silence that followed, I sensed several of the students were already practicing their form of “lethe” in this sparsely attended class.
“What are the Lotus Eaters about? Why are men turned into swine by Circe? Because they forgot they were men. They became beasts. But not Odysseus. Why does he order his men to tie him to the mast, no matter how much he’d plead to be released? Because, while his men stuff their ears with wax, he wants to hear the voices of these sirens! Knowledge—that is what Odysseus is after.” He was gone deep into the recesses of Odysseus’s mind. No one was taking the bait, most of them terrified of interrupting this intense man. He was so loud, I imagine people in Washington Square eight floors below our open window could hear him.
“Because he wants to know! To hear—to know all things! To go to the end of things. Consciousness, people, consciousness. That is the difference between life and death. This is what makes the modern man. Pay attention, I implore you!” It was sad to see this really great teacher using all of his life breath to pour the honey of Greek myth into the overstuffed minds of these bored and jaded NYU students.
Who would listen? This is the question. I understand now that I was lucky to be there, because I did recognize, if not yet completely, the importance of what he was saying, and that the Word and the Memory are what connect us through time; and one solitary young man hearing Leahy in that classroom might carry on that memory as if it were a torch passed down from Homer himself to the end of his own life—and perhaps, through my passing it on to others, ennoble the meaning of the Greek myths. Not only does Odysseus have the hugely difficult problem of surviving the Trojan War, and then nine more years of travails, but also, once he manages to get home, lo and behold, he’s facing dozens of cocky young men from a new generation thinking him long dead, now lusting after his wealth and his beautiful widow’s consent in marriage. That he, weary from all his wanderings, actually accomplishes this homecoming by pretending to be a poor beggar and slaying these aggressors and reclaiming his wife, son, and island is the most glorious of his actions—and a deeply satisfying climax to one of the greatest stories we have.
Remember that many of the most famous warriors—Hercules, driven mad, Ajax, a suicide, or Agamemnon, murdered by his wife and her lover—could not resolve this abyss at the end of their outsized lives, whereas Odysseus, despite his enormous suffering, did. When Tennyson described him in his famous poem as an older man still wanting “to seek, to find, and not to yield,” it’s the ultimate Victorian compliment to our ability to rise above our circumstances. To my mind, Odysseus is a Western hero parallel to Gautama Buddha in the Eastern tradition. But it’s telling that to the Western mind, killing your rivals and reclaiming your wife and property has far more resonance than the story of Buddha’s life, which embraces nonviolence. And that’s why, in my own life, I kept coming back to Odysseus as an example of conscious behavior. I drew sustenance from it. If he could stick it out, so could I.
Given, then, that the mythic in all of us is hiding behind the ordinary, I searched for my equivalent Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus. Leahy made me understand the people I’d been with in Vietnam had more weight than I’d felt at the time—several heroic, some cowardly, most in between.
I especially remembered two soldiers who stood out; both were sergeants, whom I encountered in two separate units of the 1st Cavalry Division. “Sergeant Barnes,” as I renamed him in the film, had the pride of Achilles, an avatar of war, quiet and dangerous, darkly handsome, prominently scarred, his wound running an entire half of his face from forehead and eye to jawline. Compact at five foot seven, he was as close to a leader as any of us in the infantry ever saw. With his four stripes—three above, one rocker below—he was really a staff NCO acting as a platoon sergeant because we were usually short-handed. I carried his radio for a stretch, walking directly behind him through the bush, keeping in contact with our platoon and company command posts. He was left-handed, a natural shooter, so smooth in his movements. It seemed fitting he hailed from Montana someplace, a nineteenth-century fur trapper type with black eyes and a bushy black mustache, seemingly scared of nothing. When he spoke, you obeyed.
One morning, out on an irregular early patrol around seven, he froze, signaling for silence. We waited. The faintest whiff of cooking fish came from the bush. He moved quickly, quietly ahead, motioning us to stay still. No distractions. A long silence followed, then some sudden shots, then nothing. Barnes came back, no expression, told me to get our patrol up here. He’d killed two Viet Cong, young men carelessly eating their breakfast, never suspecting the Americans would be out so early. They paid with their lives. Most of us were pretty excited whenever we actually, but rarely, saw the enemy, much less killed them. But Barnes was cool, so cool, no big displays ever. Having reported the incident, and stripping the dead men, he soon had us under way, no credit taken, looking for further action ahead; considering there had already been contact, the likelihood of more that day was in the air. Whereas some of us were not looking forward to such an encounter, the thought excited Barnes. He was a great soldier, probably on his second or third tour—but why? Why would he come back after a facial wound like he had? I never asked, and he never told.
You hear things in the army, as in all society, and some kind of narrative emerges; in this case, the story was that he’d been literally shot or sustained shrapnel in the face, skull, head, requiring a major reconstruction job as the scar branched deeply around his eye, nose, and cheek; even his lips were affected. And as he had clearly once been a handsome man, the scars perversely heightened his visage into a Phantom of the Opera echo—a man distorted, perhaps, by anger or revenge, or really a question mark. What was he about? He never hinted in all the time I was around him. I watched him with both curiosity and trepidation; he’d get back to the rear after we’d been out in the field a week or more and relax with booze, poker, cigarettes, sometimes a cigar. It was said he’d been in Japan in the hospital about eight months, rehabbing from the wound. And there he’d “married a Japanese gal.” And now he was back. Sort of an Ahab looking for his White Whale. And here I was, like Ishmael, walking five or ten steps behind him, always expecting that something was going to break because, like a fly, he smelled the blood of war.
As good a soldier as he was, I was relieved when he got rid of me as his radio operator. I don’t know what line I’d crossed in his mind; never said much, maybe he just didn’t like my face, maybe I was thinking too much, and you don’t want to think too much when the shit hits the fan, but I was happy to go back to “point” or “flank,” as just another grunt. Why? Because anyone who knows the infantry knows to keep your mouth shut, do what you’re told, slowly if you can, don’t volunteer for nuthin’, and don’t get singled out. Barnes was trouble, a magnet for action—and walking behind him was definitely dangerous. I was seven months in at this point, and with two wounds, I’d learned a few lessons.
I’d actually been exempt from further combat with my wounds, and was first sent from the 25th Infantry in the south to an auxiliary MP unit in Saigon, guarding billets and buildings all night—a deeply boring assignment that could turn deadly in a flash. The master sergeants (six stripes and a diamond in the center) were the true gods of the army, as close to generals as we’d ever see. They were “lifers,” guys in their forties, fifties, with twenty to thirty years’ service from World War II and Korea, many of them ballbreakers who knew better than to come out in the field and risk their life when they had a nice pension coming due; so most of them stayed in the rear with cushy “administrative” jobs and, depending on their badass nature, would fuck with you accordingly when you came back to base. Sometimes it was the uniform or your bedding, your rifle, sometimes it could be dope, or booze, or “attitude,” but whatever it was, it was bullying. My master sergeant busted me for “blousing” my trousers either inside or outside my “dirty” boots, as well as talking back to him. He charged me with an “Article 15” infraction, a common means to punish disorderly soldiers short of a court-martial. Assuming I’d lose the case, I volunteered to return to the field. This sergeant was more than happy to get rid of me, and soon enough I was ordered north to the 1st Cavalry, not far from the DMZ line between North and South Vietnam, for the rest of my fifteen-month tour.
My relationship with the master sergeant race remained dubious throughout, and I barely mention officers, because we didn’t see much of them. Platoon lieutenants were the closest to us, some good, some bad, most okay and forgettable. The platoon sergeant, like Barnes, was the boss. Sometimes a standout captain at company level, yes, but most of them had nothing to do with the bubble in which you lived. When you’re spread out in the jungle, or even the rice paddies, imagine how the lieutenant and captain disappear in the foliage or the formation itself. Majors were rare, remote, never talked to; I saw them only during large-scale, battalion-size operations, and above that, maybe once or twice a lieutenant colonel or, very rarely, like spotting a polar bear or an eagle, a general. Nor, for that matter, did I run across those much-written-about war correspondents who preferred hanging with the marines, who loved their publicity and consciously worked them. Our “regular army” lacked glamour; very rarely a story that got attention back in “the world.”
If Sergeant Barnes was a mythic Achilles, Sergeant Elias was Hector, noble but doomed. I’d come to know him in my previous unit—the Long-Range Recon Patrol (LRRP, nicknamed “Lurps”). Elias was a squad sergeant, three stripes, no rocker; it may not mean much to a civilian, but each stripe in the noncommissioned ranks meant differences in money, privileges, and sometimes life and death. Elias should have been, in experience alone, a four-striper (platoon sergeant) like Barnes, but clearly he’d been busted for some infraction. There were quite a few of these combat vets who’d been demoted. You could tell from the pride Elias had in his washed-out uniform, the rolled-up sleeves and lapels, the silver Indian-made bracelet on his smooth forearm, the Buddhist medallion he wore over his hairless chest. Like Barnes, he was compact and lithe, about five foot eight, with strong black dancing eyes, full of life like Jim Morrison on his first album cover; you’re not supposed to use the word “beautiful” for a man, but he was—a beautiful Apache from Arizona someplace, mixed with Spanish blood. In the way rumors spread, he’d “done time” back in the world, and probably made a deal with a judge to join up; he was now on his second tour. Bear in mind, guys like him could save up a good deal of money with combat pay in Vietnam, which he needed, as I’d heard he had a fucked-up marriage of some kind, with a young daughter.
Elias’s future, no doubt, with his spotty background, would be as a “lifer” in the army, that is, if he could make it through the twenty years. This was where the money was for him. Considering what I’ve read about the old-time Apaches, they could run circles around the regular cavalry and never be seen. But the reservation wore them down, as a system of gradual oppression always does. No one could resist the white man’s system—its clever use of money as reward and bribe—ensnaring all of us in a giant scheme of corruption.
Elias just loved going out on a scout. That’s what the Lurps did—take chances. They were the guys who went deep into the jungle in small groups of five to twelve and came back with the news that was supposed to make a difference. Sometimes they went into the Ashau Valley to stake out on trails or mountaintops overlooking North Vietnamese regulars moving down from Laos or North Vietnam on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the idea was not to engage, just spot and report, maybe call in artillery or just silently withdraw. Some of the nightmares were more rumored than experienced. “No one coming back alive” was usually an exaggerated claim; most of the time, nothing happened.
Anyway, as you might deduce, once I got to the 1st Cavalry in the north, I was “washed out” of the Lurps for “an attitude problem” by another prick master sergeant with a handlebar mustache much too big for his skinny, tattooed, grizzled drunk frame, another overdecorated six-striper who’d guzzled more whiskey than most broken-down fifty-year-old cowboys; you could always tell from the huge “hungry ghost” gut hanging out on a skinny frame of bones, his whiskey-soaked brains no longer able to digest food or thought. These are the guys who, when hung over, would love to hear themselves yelling at some “dumbass FNG” (fucking new guy).
I did get to know Elias a little, and he was fun to be around; everyone seemed to like him, no one had a beef going with him. He smoked dope in the rear, loved music, and could talk jive. Whereas Barnes was hard and real, Elias was dreamy, a movie star. With Barnes, you knew he’d walk out of this war alive; after all, who could kill Barnes if a bullet through his head hadn’t achieved its purpose? But Elias . . . different cat, different destiny. Far more vulnerable, feminine. Whereas with Barnes I’d be wary, with Elias I wanted to be assigned to his squad, I wanted to shine and show off for him. I wanted him, above all, to like me. But because of that master sergeant, I never got the chance.
After I was dropped from the Lurps, I moved down the road to a regular outfit with the 1st Battalion, 9th Cavalry Regiment, where I first encountered Sergeant Barnes, who ran that show. And it was there, about a month later, where I first heard it. The news came casually, like a baseball score on an overheard radio—Sergeant ’Lias from the “Lurps up the road” was KIA on patrol. Something stupid, even demeaning, had happened to him. A grenade had accidentally gone off. It wasn’t clear, but it was one of ours, not even an ambush or firefight. A man as good as Elias “wasted” by someone’s mistake. My God, I even imagined that asshole master sergeant who had it in for me had maybe gone out on some easy mission to make his quota of combat time and set something off like that, a loose grenade. But what, besides my prejudices against master sergeants, did I really know about what happened? I tried to find out, but getting the truth in a war is nearly impossible. And reading any after-action report, if you can get it, is devious.
A firefight breaks in the jungle, and at first you don’t know who’s firing in or out or where it’s coming from, and because of the varying angles in a jungle, you often don’t know where your own men are. There’s shooting, the smoke, and the screaming on the radio; and even then, there were numerous times you knew your own men were firing past you toward the supposed enemy. That’s not a fun feeling. Death comes 360°, from all directions.
No one in my new unit, including Barnes, knew him. Only me, and that made it tougher. I knew Elias’s worth as a man, but I had no one to share it with. And in time, with other events happening one upon the other, the Elias story was layered into a nest of memories. It was equally unfair the way they chopped up the units with replacement troops and moved us around with orders in such ways that we lost track of one another. Perhaps it was intended to lessen the effects on morale by keeping things anonymous and forgettable, but still we found things out through the grapevine. I never could believe the sloppiness in the reports on Elias. I always sensed something worse had happened. I tried to get down the road to my old unit and ask some questions, but opportunities like that when we were in base camp were rare. In the same vein, it wasn’t too long before Sergeant Barnes disappeared one day without fanfare, his tour apparently up; no explanations. That was the army.
Seventeen years later, in 1985, I visited the newly constructed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and caught up with Elias. He existed—I wasn’t crazy. He was inscribed as Juan Angel Elias from Arizona. And when I used his real name in my Platoon film to honor him, and mentioned him in interviews, I received another kind of confirmation when his daughter wrote me and came to Los Angeles to find out who her father was, because she sure as hell didn’t know. I didn’t either, so I couldn’t help her much. She’d been a child when he was killed, and she was fragile, struggling in her life. He was so young; we all were back then. And yes, so many of the vets and their families were struggling, not just her. War breeds that struggle. Her mother, it seems, had a stormy marriage with Elias, a lot of tough things happened to him—the law, always “the law” in America. Being from New York, I used to hate the abundance of cop shows on TV, but I recognize now that the law, the sheriff, the sense of frontier justice is embedded in the American soul, as fundamental to our thinking as the need for a gun. Forget about such a thing as class; most Americans know what jail is and what “the law” is better than they know school. People in America get into “trouble”; that’s the way it is, and then it becomes a song on a guitar. Elias was defying the odds from the beginning—too much free spirit for his own good. And Barnes, in his way, was that sheriff and would dispense that frontier justice.
But what if Barnes and Elias were in the same platoon? My imagination was kindled by the possibility. They’d be the alpha leaders of this imaginary platoon; both men, as in real life, were sexual magnets to the naked eye. The story would have a basic, striking duality in which I, as the newcomer Chris Taylor, would be attracted to different sides of myself—my father’s strong, “realistic” masculine attitude in Barnes in conflict with my mother’s rule-breaking rebel in Elias. It intrigued me. And what if it ended up with one man destroying the other? As Achilles did Hector.
As I kept writing, my memories were expanding, and I began to understand my experience in Vietnam on a deeper level. Ours had been a battle of man and his corruption in a system that demanded every man there had to lie, which, in a sense, was a form of dishonoring ourselves. The war there was one of the many manifestations of the Lie, which I’d first experienced during my parents’ divorce. There were three lies I saw. The first was “friendly fire,” which had killed a man I’d liked and admired—Sergeant Elias. As defined by the rules, “friendly fire” was death by our own weaponry—bombs, artillery shells, grenades, rifle and M79 fire in close combat. It included “accidents” that happened all the time—gunships opening fire on us; artillery coordinates that were a few degrees off in a jungle; an F-16 flying in low and fast, operating off shifting coordinates; even a guy who didn’t read directions so good might point his Claymore mine inward instead of outward and, instead of blowing up NVA soldiers on his perimeter, would make a mess of himself when it went off in his face.
The Pentagon, which years later turned down Platoon’s initial request for technical assistance (calling the script a falsification and distortion of service life), doesn’t talk about it much, but “friendly fire” might have unofficially killed and wounded, I believe, at least 15 percent of the boys in Vietnam, probably more. The military has cut it out of the official records and Hollywood movies as much as they can, because they don’t want thousands of poor parents or wives getting upset about their loved ones dying so stupidly. Imagine—15 percent of the American KIA in Vietnam amounts to almost nine thousand; and then there are the three hundred thousand wounded, seventy-five thousand of them severely disabled. Ron Kovic, in his searing memoir Born on the Fourth of July, wrote a profound chapter about how he shot one of his own men by mistake. After Ron’s marine CO refused to accept his declaration of culpability, Ron allowed this incident to build into a mountainload of guilt that led to Ron essentially offering himself as a sacrifice—and ending up sealed in a wheelchair the rest of his tormented life. I have no proof either, but I’m 75 percent sure an incompetent squad sergeant in the 25th Infantry early in my tour almost killed me in my first ambush action at night when, from behind me, he carelessly threw his grenade “short,” close to my position, and blasted me into unconsciousness. I was, in fact, very lucky to survive. Another inch in, and the shrapnel would’ve severed my jugular. This goes on all the time, and is, I think, one of the great secrets of modern war.
The second lie involved killing civilians—by bomb and artillery mostly, but also by infantry. We were careless. The My Lai massacre in March of ’68 had decimated several villages, resulting in a body count of more than five hundred civilians—without one enemy bullet being fired. We heard about it, and knew this killing arose from the frustration of losing men to mines and never seeing the enemy. Villagers then replaced the enemy in many GIs’ minds. And as the summer of ’68 progressed, it grew uglier. Between missions into the thickly covered Ashau Valley, we’d run “recons” as well as “search and destroy” missions on villages up and down the coast around Quang Tri and Hue. We were angry much of the time, because our sergeants made us look for VC in holes, pits, bunkers, and you never knew what the fuck was down there—would it blow up in your face? You’d yell, “Get the fuck out! Get out!” into these hidden spaces, and sometimes one or two villagers would slowly pop out, terrified. Then you’d find weapons, and arms, and rice stores all around these villages. So you hated the civilians, because you felt they were supporting them, the enemy. I felt sorry for the villagers too, because I knew they were getting pressure from the other side. I didn’t know where their real political sympathies lay; I don’t believe most of them had them. They were into survival, just like we were.
We might be walking up on a village one day, and there’d be an old lady walking away down a trail. A grunt, in a bad mood and just fucking with her, would yell, “Hey, gook, come here. Hey, you—‘didi’! You—get your ass over here!” She might not hear, or she wouldn’t want to turn around because she was scared. She’d just keep walking a few more steps. The guy wouldn’t ask her a second time, he’d just raise his M16—boom, boom, boom. No questions asked. She hadn’t come when he told her to. He wouldn’t have done that with an officer around, or a sergeant with authority, but it happened.
One time I came close to losing it. It was a blindingly hot day, and I was sick and tired of Vietnamese villagers protesting, denying, moaning in self-pity, lying to us, hiding things from us, it didn’t matter. I was just sick of the whole thing—our role in this, their language, their smell, their anger at us, and my own fear and anger all mixed up. And when a stubborn old farmer started yelling at me accusingly, I snapped. I fired several rounds right at his feet, screaming at him to “shut up and dance, motherfucker! Shut the fuck up!” I wanted to kill him, and I could’ve gotten away with it. We were spread out in pockets, two or three men around me, no sergeants with us. The other soldiers were busy searching other parts of the village. But I didn’t kill him; there was the thinnest of lines that prevented me, the thinnest thread of humanity in me that didn’t break.
In a different village, I broke up a group of three soldiers harassing two Vietnamese teenage girls; the tension was growing into a clumsy rape. Some men in my platoon turned on me for that. Another time, a dumb eighteen-year-old kid in our group boasted quietly that he’d killed someone; he’d bashed in the head of an old woman with the stock of his M16, then burned her hooch down to wipe out the crime. Nobody saw it because the village was spread out; he was arrogant and stupid, and no one took him seriously, but who really knows what he did? You see, it was a kind of game if you could fuck “them” up without getting caught; some of the guys were like naughty kids with rifles getting away with something—that’s how crazy it could get. We were always pushing them, shoving them, treating them like lower beings, animals. We were bullies. There was just no telling what happened in a village that was spread over several hundred meters.
I became an acknowledged killer one day that summer when we ran into a mean little ambush in a beach area not far from the ocean on the outskirts of a village; we lost a lieutenant and a sergeant as well as our scout dog, a German shepherd I’d taken quite a liking to. It was one of these strange little firefights that grew from single random shots into a raging storm of bullets. Two of our platoons were spread out over approximately a hundred yards, confused by the directions on the radio—when suddenly there was new fire from inside our own positions, which created even more confusion. This was highly dangerous, and it would’ve been a calamity for us to enter into a crossfire situation where we were shooting each other; the enemy was often known to plan ambushes so that would happen. I was under no obligation to do anything but keep my head down and let this thing work itself out. Yet I strongly felt I had to deal with this confusion myself or no one else would, and a disaster would happen today. I had to do something. Maybe I was really cold and angry about that police dog’s death, or the futility of it all, or maybe, like Camus once described, I just had a headache and the sun was burning too hot in my eyes. Who the fuck knows these things? I did know one thing—that this was my moment in time to act, and if I didn’t . . .
Exposing myself, I rushed a spider hole from which I sensed someone had fired and taken cover. Without further thinking, I threw my grenade from about fifteen yards away toward the tiny hole. This was very risky, because if I’d overthrown the grenade, it might’ve easily wounded or killed our own men crouched ten yards beyond the hole, unsure of what to do. But it was a perfect pitch, and the grenade sailed into the hole like a long throw from an outfielder into a catcher’s mitt—followed quickly by the concussed thump of the explosion. Wow. I’d done it! Warily I moved in closer, thinking he might still be alive, but when I looked down into the hole, the man was mauled, torn, and very dead. It felt good. I actually saw the man I killed, which was rare in this jungle warfare. I was proud. Barnes would’ve been proud of me too if he’d been there. His efficiency was now mine. The dozen men who saw the action were astonished—and grateful. Somehow word got around, and I was quite surprised a week later to be told by the lieutenant I was going to get a Bronze Star. For what? Doing what I was supposed to do—which, in truth, a lot of people didn’t do under battle pressure. But still—I’d prevented what might’ve turned out to be a bloody mess. My description of it might seem callous, but it isn’t—that moment will stay with me the rest of my life. I see the moment again and again in my consciousness. Why? I don’t know why. I feel no guilt. He’s dead. I’m alive. That’s the way it works. We all trade places, if not in this life then in another time and place.
You can get away with “friendly fire” casualties, you can get away with killing civilians, but the third lie—saying you’re winning a war that you’re losing—was too big to hide. I think back to the enemy attack the night of January 1, 1968. Even at our level in the infantry, we recognized that we’d just been through a major “probe” a few miles from the Cambodian border by an NVA regiment (two to three thousand men) moving toward Saigon. The “probe,” in the official Pentagon report, apparently came in three waves, beginning with a mortar attack at 11:30 p.m., another wave at 1 a.m. infiltrating the perimeter, and a third one ending at 5:15 a.m. Now, as I said, they never tell you shit in the infantry, but this I saw with my own eyes. We counted some four hundred dead NVA, whom we buried in mass graves. You had to pay attention, because the NVA, up to that point, had rarely wasted men on frontal attacks of this size against a heavily armed US battalion.
For weeks now, our patrols had found caches of stored rice, weapons, even “order of battle” maps that were indicating some kind of operation under way. This information was taken back by US intel officers to General Westmoreland’s MACV headquarters in Saigon. Who was looking at this vast trove of information? Interpreters? Translators? Who was really seeing the big picture? Certainly not the CIA, which was, in reality, telling our generals what to do. Instead of alertly preparing for what became a gigantic attack four weeks later on every provincial capital in the country, what did we do? Well, the story got around that Westmoreland had actually come out to visit the site of our New Year’s battle a couple of days after my company was rotated back to base camp.
Westmoreland was a great-looking military man, six feet, three inches, perfect uniform, trim salt-and-pepper hair; he probably could have run for president. But my Lord, he had the dumbest eyes, the same kind I’d seen on so many other six- and seven-stripers. He was imposing, no doubt, he could talk better, but what did he say when he came out to the field? Westmoreland, as unimaginative as the French generals in World War I, apparently wasn’t interested in the conclusions that could be drawn from the battle that night, but rather focused on the sloppy state of our uniforms and the troops’ lack of haircuts. The 25th, at this point, had a spotty reputation because we carried a lot of draftee replacement troops like in the 4th and 1st Infantries. But the truth was we’d been out in the bush a long time, many of us pretty regularly since September, and there’d been a constant upsurge in movement by the enemy heading south and east. Why wasn’t he paying closer attention to that? Why was the focus of the American media at that time intent on our marines up north at the siege of Khe Sanh, which, while deadly and dramatic, was in truth a diversion? The NVA never even made a frontal attack. The real knockout punch came against Saigon in the south. Classic move—fake with the left, hit with the right, that’s what the Vietnamese did, and General Giap, the brilliant North Vietnamese commander, later confirmed that. His objective was to cut the country in half at the South Vietnamese capital.
In any case, when NVA troops materialized, division-size, at the Tet Offensive in late January of ’68, in far greater numbers than were ever estimated, and then again in a second, smaller offensive in April ’68, the troops knew for sure the brass was lying to us big-time. It was all PR bullshit—the inflated “body counts,” the unwavering faith that our technological supremacy would triumph was crap. All that bombing—for nothing! We were losing because we weren’t winning; you can’t relocate an entire peasantry on new land in artificial villages with no respect for tradition or history. Nor, for that matter, could you import Las Vegas–sized army bases with all the latest PX material goods and all the dollars they represented into an extremely poor nation without destroying the values of our so-called Vietnamese “collaborators.” How could you not pretend to like Americans with their money—“GI number one! VC number ten!” How many hookers did I get to know who told me this kind of bullshit, and yet you knew that even the worst black market hooker, selfish, mean, vengefully hating men, still had a bump in her heart for her nation and for Ho Chi Minh as a fighter for their independence. Yes, many of them were looking for the quick buck or marriage to an American, but they all knew the GIs would not stay in Vietnam; it was the Vietnamese who would stay in Vietnam. The reckoning was coming, and the Americans would not be there to save them. Same was true later in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever we set our occupations. There was no faith in us, and why should there be?
In any event, Westmoreland’s war was falling apart that year. President Lyndon Johnson was running from it in March, when he announced that he’d not seek another term. You think soldiers are so stupid that they’re going to risk their lives when their commander in chief cuts and runs? And then in April, less than a month later, Martin Luther King was shot down in Memphis, and blacks turned their hard anger on white folks both in our home country and in the platoons out in the field. Barely two months after that, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in another ridiculous scenario of incompetent protection and cover-up lies, and America was really on fire. Riots that summer of ’68, cops with sticks beating kids and blacks, law and order—the country was falling apart. And at the same time, a conservative counter-element was being born in disgust at the new freedoms assumed by this ’60s generation, the “love it or leave it” mentality of redneck culture. Shades of Barnes and Elias. The civil war that we’d helped start in Vietnam was coming home.
The Lie in our culture was the root of our failure. Perhaps it’s our love of exaggeration. In combat reports, in movies, we made everything bigger than it was—counting civilians as soldiers in the body counts, after-battle reports that glamorized ordinary reactions. I’m not saying there wasn’t unusual heroism out there, but it was far rarer than our media and Pentagon salesmen would have us believe. Not having come close to suffering the casualty rates of the Germans, Russians, and Japanese in World War II, we really have no concept of the parameters of true disaster. Most of our generals who’ve worked their way up the Pentagon pole are tough guys, sure, with competitive egos, but it’s a way of life that encourages obedient, conventional thinking; it’s far easier to get along than question what we’re doing and why. These professional men, in their lust for promotion, for “action,” grow far too eager to hype or inflate any kind of risk into a “major threat” to our nationhood. Who doesn’t exaggerate their own importance, especially when it comes to their payday? But from this individual inflation comes this “national security” madness of $700 billion–plus budgets for our military to prevent anything “bad” from happening to us. And yet every one of us knows from our individual experience of life that it doesn’t work that way. You can’t insure yourself against what you fear, because the more you do so, the more fearful and insecure you become. The result is a form of insanity, looking for total security in a world where security can never, for any individual, be certain. The hypocrisy—and more, corruption—sickened me then and now, which is one of the reasons why I got into so much trouble later on, criticizing our way of life—because we lie to ourselves, and we’ve confused the ordinary citizen who worries that terrorists are hiding in his barbeque pit, or that Russia is subverting our “democracy” with insidious forms of hybrid warfare, or Chinese economics are eating our lunches with their chopsticks. In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased—only grown louder. The joke is on us. We’re the clowns. Ha Ha Ha.
I had my story, I realized. I was no hero. I’d slept on my consciousness. My whole country, our society had. But at the least—if I could tell the truth of what I’d seen—it was better than . . . what? Nothing—the void of a meaningless war and waste of life while our society was stuffing its ears with wax. Odysseus, lashing himself to his mast to preserve his sanity, had insisted on hearing the Sirens, and remembering it. Whereas I was honored for my service to my country, the truth was I’d soiled myself when I could’ve resisted, exiled myself, gone to jail for it like the Berrigans, the Spocks, and some 200,000 others. I was young, yes, and I can say that I didn’t know better, that I was part of the unconsciousness of my country.
I didn’t really wake up until I was thirty years old—in 1976. I was not the kid I thought I was. I was really the child of two fathers—Barnes and Elias, who represented this dividing war for America. I was darkened. A part of me had gone numb there . . . died, in Vietnam, murdered. My story would be about the lies and war crimes, which were committed not just by one platoon but, in spirit, by every unit. The specific crime in this case would take place in a village with the lead sergeant, Barnes, murdering a villager in frustration because he feels they are collectively helping the enemy to destroy his men. The other sergeant, Elias, lesser in rank, would turn on him and resist. This man would own his honor and integrity, which says do not kill the civilians caught in this war. He would take the other road and bring charges of a war crime against Barnes.
Elias, in an intimate moment, would reveal his feelings to Chris Taylor in a foxhole one night: “You know, we’ve been kicking other people’s asses so long, I guess it’s time we got ours kicked.” He would talk about “politicians selling us another used war,” and he’d say that it’s up to the veterans, people like us, to remember and never to forget: “That’s why the survivors remember. ’Cause the dead don’t let ’em forget.” And that’s why Elias, in my mind, would be one of those who died. He would be sacrificed by us because he was what was left of a good America.
America was more Barnes than Elias, and in his quiet cunning and animal instinct for survival, Barnes would kill his mortal enemy, Elias, under the cover of a “friendly fire” incident. If he didn’t, he’d be prosecuted, cashiered, his military career destroyed by Elias’s charges. I think, truth be told, a lot of Americans would agree with Barnes. Kill the whistleblowers. They’re traitors, undermining our cause.
At the real battle, as I’ve said, I’d walked through that incredible night and seen absolutely nothing of the enemy. In the film, I had my character Chris Taylor do a horrible but honorable thing. He’d witnessed Barnes killing Elias, and it would sear his heart. Using the all-night battle as his cover, he’d avenge the betrayed ghost of Elias and slaughter Barnes, already badly wounded and now descended to his basest animal state, crawling through the bloody mud of the jungle floor, begging for death. Taylor would pull that trigger and do the Beast a great favor by putting it out of its suffering.
Or would he? Should he? Should Chris Taylor not kill Barnes? Walk away? Leave his miserable soul in hell? In movies the hero is never supposed to stoop to the level of the villain—never. It’s a rule instilled in theatrical dramaturgy and, more viscerally, in movie blood. And yet, in the screenplay, I left myself both choices. And when it came time to shoot the film and edit it a decade later, I did what the brutality in me demanded. I killed him. I killed the bastard because I wanted to.
Why? Because, as I’ve said, that war had poisoned me too. Because a piece of Barnes was in me. I believe my decision shocked quite a few members of the audience when the film was finally seen in 1986. Letters were written calling for my prosecution as a war criminal. The truth, though not admitted by the majority of those who’d served there, was that Vietnam had debased us all. Whether we killed or not, we were part of a machine that’d been so morally dead as to bomb, napalm, poison this country head to toe, when we knew this was not a real war to defend our homeland. No honest American could ever look himself in the eye and say this was akin to our World War II effort against German Nazi fascism or Japanese imperialism. I wanted the audience to feel the shame that I felt, and that we all should have felt—the truck drivers, the clerks in the rear, and, yes, the civilians paying their taxes in the USA—for having participated in that war as a nation. Having left Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in bombed-out shreds, toxins and land mines everywhere, 4 to 5 million of them dead, hundreds of thousands maimed and poisoned, countless refugees—was this not a pure Holocaust created out of American firepower? Though there’ve been many great things that have been accomplished in my country—a resourcefulness, a progress, a relative social and racial integration, and I obviously could go on—and though we’ve convinced ourselves again and again of that greatness, there is darkness that still lurks at the edge of town, in the nights without sleep.
I finished the first draft of my script in a few weeks, calling it simply “The Platoon.” I knew it was good, solid work—maybe some of the best stuff I’d done yet. Maybe it was even the fabled lotus flower sprung from the mud and shit of that awful war. But I was by now enough of a realist to know it’d be a tough sell. There’d been no movie made from the grunt’s point of view about Vietnam, and it was still a highly unpopular war, “a bummer” to the American imagination. No one, I was made to believe, wanted to know more about it. I wasn’t optimistic.
Shortly after, my mother called from Paris to tell me my beloved grandmother, Mémé, to whom I’d written from Vietnam, had died in her arms in Paris at eighty-four. Could I come right away for the funeral? My father would pay my expenses.
The funeral was only three days away when, on a gray afternoon on a quiet street in the suburbs of Paris, I approached Mémé’s pre–World War I apartment building, where she’d moved after Pépé’s death. It was strange. The dead were calling to me from the past—Vietnam, now France. I thought about how Odysseus went to the Underworld to find Tiresias for a prophecy about when and how he’d return home to Ithaca. And once in the Underworld, he recognized his mother, Anticlea, who, like the other shades, had come to him to slake herself at the pool of sheep’s blood he sacrificed to get there.
I climbed the creakiest of stairs and shared sparse words with a gloomy female neighbor with a mustache who was supervising the visits of my grandmother’s relatives. I was alone, the apartment was musty with bric-a-brac and pictures of a lifespan back to 1890s France. I made my way down a dark, narrow corridor into a simple bedroom. A crucifix was on the wall over the bed where she lay. It was still a shock; the dead I’d seen had violent expressions, but Mémé was at peace, listening, watching; she was a presence in the room, no question, motionless like an oracle, her awareness in the air as if someone else besides myself was hearing the ticking of the mantelpiece clock. They close the eyes of the dead, but after a while you expect them to open; you always remember a person’s eyes when they’re alive. I thought of that scene from Last Tango in Paris where Marlon Brando sits next to the bed and grows angry with his dead wife, cursing her memory. Movies can help, but not this time.
I drew my chair closer to be with her, like we’d been when I was young, cuddled in her big bed as she told me the stories of the wolves in Paris who’d come down the chimneys to snatch the children who’d been bad. Of all her grandchildren, she’d treated me as special because I was “l’Américain,” and she’d secretly give me extra francs and candies from her stash in her giant armoire. I knew I could get away with almost anything with her; and my cousins were jealous of that intimacy.
Forty years with her beloved Pépé, married from 1918 to his death in 1958, each experiencing two harsh wars, but she never complained or expected much more from life other than the basics—and some love. The First War took so many men from that generation—you sobered in the presence of the old France of Mémé and Pépé. For my mother, the postwar period had devolved into being about having fun, but for Mémé it had always been about duty. Yet she naturally forgave my mother, as she did me. For Mémé, family was everything.
I stayed in the bedroom a long time. There was the silence of “la mort,” and then the October light began to drop. No one else knocked or visited. Just me. And you, Mémé—and that something listening between us. Not long ago I’d been twenty-three. You were so happy when I’d returned in one piece from over there. I’d tried to pay my debt to society. We all have one, we don’t live only for ourselves. But I still felt uneasy and Mémé did too. What did Vietnam have to do with saving our civilization when it only made the world more callous? You never asked me for an explanation. Three wars in your lifetime . . .
The American experiment? It had started so well. What went wrong with this generation? You stayed married, you and Pépé. Now the world is going crazy with too much—sex, cars, TV, money—people are spoiled, unhappy, like rats drowning on a sinking ship of their desires. There are no excuses anymore, it’s too late.
Your daughter, now divorced, living an unmoored life, no proper partner, had she really achieved, in the end, the independence she so desired? And her only son? At least I’d survived, but I was floundering. I’d been home seven years, and as I saw my life through my father’s eyes—which were still my eyes—I’d done nothing. I’d achieved nothing. Therefore I was nothing. All through my twenties I’d made various deals with Time—as if Time really made deals with anybody. And now, at thirty, all those heaps of inner dialogue were coming to a hard-crashing dead end, because I never listened or changed—as a student leaving college twice, quitting several jobs, quitting my marriage, forever angry with my idealized self, losing friends because they did not live up to . . . and seeking solace in romantic notions of suicide, Vietnam, and movies. You racked it all up like a bill in a restaurant and it sounded awful.
I was crying but didn’t know I was until I felt the tears. I hadn’t cried in so many years—I was a hard boy. I had to be, I felt, to survive. I was raised to believe men don’t cry. But this time it feels fresh, like a rain. But who am I crying to? Not you, Mémé—you’re not the one judging me. You never have. Is it my self I’m crying to? My self, but who was that? I could not see myself. I was ugly, hiding.
I could cry myself dry with self-pity. All this pain, so much pain. Yes, I feel it now—feel sorry for myself, it’s okay—so raw, all my lies, my embarrassment naked for the dead to see, naked to the whole world! No one loves me, no one will ever love me. Because I can’t love anyone—except you, Mémé, and you’re gone now. Can I . . . can I learn to love? How can I start? By just being kind, like you were? Can I be kind—to myself? Can I learn to love myself? In my mind, I heard Mémé reply: “Try—you’re a man now. You’re no longer seventeen sitting on the sidelines of your life, judging. You’ve seen this world, tasted its tears. Now’s the time to recognize this, Oliver, Oliver, Oliver”—my name, invoked three times to rouse myself, to wake myself from this long slumber. Do something with your life, I demanded, all this energy bottled up for years, hopeless dreaming and writing, no excuse, you can do better. Stop fucking around.
Mémé continued speaking to me so gently. That soft voice: “Mon chéri, mon p’tit Oliverre, te fais pas de soucis pour rien . . . toute mes bêtises, mes soucis, à quoi çasert? Regardes moi maintenant—comme je suis.” (My darling, my little Oliver, don’t be miserable for nothing . . . All my worries, what good did it do me? Look at me now—the way I am.)
I looked and saw. Nothing but her silence. In it was her answer.
“Fais ta vie. Fais ce que tu veux faire. C’est tout ce qu’il y a. Je t’embrasse, je t’adore.” (Make your life. Do what you have to do. That’s all there is. I embrace you, I adore you.)
The other shades were approaching now, smelling the blood, so many young men groaning. They envied me. I thought I saw Elias among them but wasn’t sure; others I barely recognized, limbs, faces distorted in death. There was whispering, many voices. “Stone, hey man, don’t forget me! Where you goin’? Gimme some! Hey, tell my girl you saw me, will ya? Remember me, will ya? . . . You got a joint?” Mémé wanted me to go—quickly, before it was too late. I couldn’t hear, but it was clear what the shades were saying: We, the dead, are telling you—your lifespan is short. Make of it everything you can. Before you’re one of us.
I rose and kissed Mémé’s face one last time, inhaling her smell as best I could, recalling the perfume she wore and the feel on my cheek as a boy of her cashmere-covered breasts. “Au revoir, ma belle Mémé.” And I walked out—as she looked away and began slaking her thirst with the others.
The gloomy neighbor with the mustache managed a nod of recognition on the way out, closing the apartment up; today was the last visiting day. French stoicism was implicit in her shrug of “Eh ben, ta grand-mère était une bonne femme. Quoi d’autre peut-on dire des gens?” (Well, your grandmother was a good woman. What else can we say about people?)
I walked the silent streets to the Metro. Like in a dreamscape, there were no living people. Maybe that’s the reason we die. It makes us want to live again.
I went back to New York with a certainty about what I had to do now. Over the next month, I worked another draft of Platoon relatively quickly and sent it out to the usual suspects. I told my host and roommate, Danny, I was going to Los Angeles for good, “to give it a last shot.” He recognized that our collaboration hadn’t worked out, but most things didn’t work out; he also knew he’d be lonelier without me than I without him. Youth still had the legs of hope. There were not too many other good-byes to share. There’d be a somewhat cold, embarrassed meeting with Najwa; our divorce papers had been filed as inexpensively as possible and, because of New York State law, would take a year to become final. My mother wasn’t around. It’s funny how she drops out of the play at a time like this, a missing leading lady in act two. Unlike my father, she always believed I’d be something in my life, which of course meant a lot even if it was an unconscious faith.
New York was near death, in deep debt to its bondholders, services slashed, garbage piling up in the streets. President Ford, in the words of an infamous tabloid headline, had told New Yorkers to “DROP DEAD!” And it almost did for a few years, before it was reincarnated as the “Big Apple” tourist mecca of the world in a brilliant public relations campaign designed by savvy real estate developers. The same New York, but rediscovered. Old bones, new flesh. Everything replenished. I never saw it coming.
Dad hoped I’d at least end up with a job inside “the system”—at a studio, reading scripts, on a set . . . something. He didn’t like Platoon when he read it: It was ugly. Who’d want to see it? “Why can’t you give people hope?” he complained.
But there was hope, I said. “In telling the truth of what happened. In being honest.”
“People don’t want to know the truth,” he countered. “Reality is too tough. They go to the movies to get away from all that.”
How could I argue with him? He was right. In a way. He’d always counseled me growing up, “Kiddo, don’t tell the truth, you’ll only get yourself in trouble.” I would certainly find that out for myself later.
But now it was fitting I go west to start another life. Like Jim Morrison sang, “the West is the best.” I flew out on an economy ticket with two suitcases, my expectations minimal, resigned to whatever would happen. When you’re a newborn, hands you don’t know hold you, guide you, someone feeds you, sticking you on a tit . . . then some woman’s face looms up, makes soft sounds, and tells you . . . suckle, my baby, suckle.