All language subtitles for Platoon.1986.2160p.HDR.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA.5.1.x265.SHD13.mkv.stream21-eng

Arnold Kopelson, John Daly, England,
put up the money.

That was quite something.
I couldn't get the money for 10 years,

and a British company finally put it up
and took a chance.

Grandiose opening invocation,

sort of something from the lliad
or the Odyssey,

but it's the Bible, I felt, would be...

"Rejoice, O young man.

"Rejoice in thy life
and the days of thy youth."

We located... We put a lot of dust in there.

It was hard to get this airport
in the Philippines, in Manila.

Outside Manila.

And we also get the planes.

We didn't have a lot of money
to make the movie, less... About $6 million.

So it was all struggling.

We got this gigantic plane
through bartering.

Coming out of the belly of the whale

was the first memory of a lot
of my memory over there in Vietnam.

When I arrived in September, 1967,

September 15th, to be precise,

it was my 21st birthday.

Came out of these big planes
on the way inland,

actually, from Cam Ranh Bay,
back into places like Cu Chi.

This would probably be
like arriving at Cu Chi.

Or it could be from Cu Chi up to Dau Tieng,
which was the Third...

Third Brigade base camp
where I was based,

in the rubber plantation.
Michelin rubber plantation.

Near the Cambodian border. Not far from it.

This...
I remember seeing bodies coming out

as we arrived at various places.

There'd always be bodies moving back.

And, obviously you can see

that the guys who came into Vietnam
were replacements.

They just went...
Filtered out for these dead people.

They would be sent to the units
where these dead people had come from.

So we were all broken up when we arrived.
Very few of us stayed together

from basic training, the advanced training,
or anything.

We just were separated.

Here's the returning veterans.
And I'd look for a man with a death's head.

Oh, Lord!

Xin loi, buddy.

Crossing dollies.
I remember we did that out at the airport.

That was an interesting shot.

And Adagio by Samuel Barber
sort of came about

because we wanted a noble theme,
a solemn theme, an austere one.

And in the temp dub, while we were
editing the film, we cut it to Barber.

We asked our composer, Georges Delerue,

French composer
who worked with Francois Truffaut,

to follow this style of this.

to follow this style of this.

And he worked very hard, Georges,
and worked very difficult hours

to match the majesty of Barber,
but it's impossible.

We ended up using much of Georges' music
in the movie,

and we'll see that later,

but this opening theme
could not be matched.

So we went with the Adagio from
the temp dub and we left it into the final.

I wanted to introduce the men
in the platoon in this sequence,

quiet silence of the jungle,
moving through bush.

Men fell, men slipped, men cut themselves.

It's hard to move through bush,
and I wanted to establish that.

This is a young point man, Charlie Sheen.

He's never been around,
doesn't know much,

and he's cutting point,
practically the first day.

It's a very... Happened to me.

And it represents, sort of,
the demoralized state of this unit, too.

They would put a guy who really
didn't have much experience up on point.

These are flank guys.
They're out there on the flank.

And these guys are M79s.
You see M60s. You see M16s.

Who's on Tail-end Charlie?

And it's the faces of the young guys
that are so important, too,

‘cause that's why I made all these troops

go through two weeks of jungle training

with Captain Dale Dye, there,
our technical advisor.

I wanted them to not sleep
for two weeks, essentially,

and to really feel what it was like
to live in the earth, next to the...

In the jungle.

To get the smell of the jungle. No showers.

No sleep.

By the time they started to work here...
This is one of the first scenes we shot.

They were really pissed off, these troops.

Pissed off at me, pissed off at the world.
They were hungry.

So it was a great experience.

You can't take an actor and just make him
into an infantryman like that.

You need to have a context.

-Get up.
-Get up.

Get a move on, boy.

Charlie's beginning to just fall apart here.

You can see the state that he's getting into,

where you just get so exhausted
you don't even see what's in front of you,

and the six inches
in front of your face are gone.

He...

He smells death here.
You smell it before you see it.

It's a dead Vietnamese soldier.

Could be NVA, could be Vietcong.

Boy, what you waiting for?

That's Sgt. Barnes,
who is his platoon sergeant.

He walks right behind him
and gave him a hard time.

Gave me a hard time, too.

Set up the tension of the jungle,
silence, the smell, the feel.

All these young actors
were really a pleasure to pick.

They... Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker,

they all moved on
to do something with their lives,

and this was, like,
almost their first or second film roles,

and it was just great
to be with a bunch like this.

It was sort of my fantasy
of a John Sturges picture,

like The Magnificent Seven or something,
but with youngsters.

And I kind of sensed that these guys
would be around for some years,

and it would be a pleasure
to, sort of, have known them in their youth.

Tom Berenger had been on a downslide,
I think, in TV stuff and...

And it was a pleasure to work with him,
and it was fine.

I always thought he was a rugged guy,

and I was able to work with him
and get his tougher side out there.

Gardner, up.

Gardner, get your ass up the hill,
you fat fuck!

They feel lost in this jungle.

They're wandering like ghosts
in the landscape.

There's not much sense of purpose
or destination or...

Like, in the World War Il or Korean pictures,

you know, you're going someplace,
you have a mission.

Here, the mission is basically
just to keep walking.

And red ants, black ants, they were...
Red ants were...

Black ants were actually worse,
worse bite than red ants,

but they plagued us all the time.

And Willem Dafoe
as Sgt. Elias is interesting,

also cast against type.

Because Berenger had been
sort of the good guy,

and I basically made him
a little more darker.

And Willem, here,
who had been playing thugs and terrorists,

and I thought
I could do something with him,

his sweetness,
his essential sort of Nordic sweetness.

I don't want you cramping up.

You're humping too much stuff, troop.

You don't need half this shit.

Got a nice voice, Willem,
very soft and soothing.

We shot a lot of corals.

I remember we tested in the jungle,
in the Philippines.

And this is a rainforest
about two hours out of Manila.

We were based in Manila, I think,
at this point,

and went back and forth every day.

Charlie has a heat spell and faints.

This is a very difficult location to get to.

Two-Two, this is Six.

I understand you have a bird inbound
at your pos at this time.

Tough shot.

A lot of close helicopter work.
We almost got wiped out a couple of times.

Bravo Six, Bravo Six, be advised.

This is...
Well, we secured perimeters every night

in Vietnam, dug our holes.

This is hard work.
Get the water out, get the re-supplies.

Another tough shot.

You can see the actors are really struggling
against the prop wash.

Move it!

And the feet are always getting swollen.

People are screwing around
with their feet, too,

to try to get out of the field, too, ‘cause
it's a miserable existence sometimes.

You see some nice coral work here.

We gave it a nice flavor for... A reddish hue.

We built these perimeters.

Yeah, I had a problem with my...

One of the producers and I were arguing

‘cause I really wanted to get up on this hill
over here. This is a fairly large hike.

I mean, there was no car, vehicles,
able to get into this spot.

So we walked about a mile up the valley

into this hill range, and we...

And I said
I wanted everybody to sleep out here.

And, "Let's do it like the old John Ford
pictures, where you just camp out.”

So they all said yes
and they went up the hill.

We did the shooting
and they all went back...

They ran back down the hill that night
to get back to the hotels.

But we got up there and it's a hard...

You can see how far it is from anything.
You can sense it.

What you been smoking, Junior?

There's Forest Whitaker.

And Reggie Johnson's
another fine young actor.

...hump, hump, and hump.

Hey, white boy, what you waiting for?
That hole ain't gonna dig itself.

Come on, boy.
Get your dick skin on that thing! Dig!

We ain't got all day! Dig! Dig!

Somebody once wrote,

"Hell is the impossibility of reason."

That's what this place feels like. Hell.

I hate it already.

These were my feelings, pretty much,
at the time.

I was really caught out of sorts.
I mean, I was a good athlete, but I just...

As a soldier, this is a rugged life,
and cutting point all day,

not knowing anybody, being picked on

because they didn't care
about the new guys as much, you know?

They were... We were expendable.

Because if you'd been there for a while,

you always bonded with the people
who had been there with you.

So that was...

I, as all people, a lot of new people were,
was lost and confused

and writing letters to my grandmother,
of all people,

because I was having a struggle
with my parents at that time

and I wasn't getting along with them,
so I was writing to my grandmother.

And these guys were all in my...

I was in four different combat platoons,
basically, and...

First Cavalry, First Air Cav.

And this is a combination of men
that I met in these units.

So it's not necessarily that they're all
in the same unit at the same time.

Sgt. Barnes and Sgt. Elias
were not in the same unit

at the same time, for example.

I don't think I can keep this up for a year,
Grandma.

I think I made a big mistake coming here.

Charlie has an interesting stoicism
in his face.

At the same time, he evokes a boy

who comes from a middle-class strata
of America,

or upper-middle-class strata.

So that was an interesting added extra
for me.

I liked Charlie's integrity.

I almost cast his brother Emilio in it
a few years before,

when I was trying to make the film,

and it's ironic that Charlie,
who I'd met when he was 15 years old,

came back in when he was about 19, 18,

and the moment he walked in the room,

I knew he was the right one.

Roger that.

Okay, move out in two-zero mikes.

The scar on Sgt. Barnes
is the work of Gordon Smith.

It's a very interesting new technique
that was used at that time,

in 1986, when we shot the movie.

It involved applying a glue-like prosthetic
to his face

and giving it that shape within an hour,

and then I think we got it down...

By the end, we got it down
to about a half an hour of work.

So it's an amazing amount of work.

I mean, it probably could...
The conventional way,

it would have taken hours
to put that makeup on.

It did have a tightening effect
and a deleterious effect on Berenger's skin,

So we used it sparingly

so that he would not...

In other words,
we would ask them to put the scar on

when we did all or as much work
as we could on the right side of his face,

so that he wouldn't have to walk around
with it all day long.

I think, in front of the men,
it's necessary for me to give the orders.

Beautiful Philippine foliage colors.

Long-lensing here in this valley.

This is a shot done at the lip of night.

One of my favorite shots.

You see a storm coming up.

...crotch rot
on that ugly face of yours, Junior.

Goddamn, man.
You break your ass for the white man.

No justice, right?

What's O'Neill got,
a nose up the lieutenant's ass already?

How come we always get fucking ambush?

'Cause it's politics, man, politics.

Hey, Chris, did I show you
a picture of Lucy Jean?

No, you didn't.

She's the one for me, all right,
that Lucy Jean.

-And she's waiting for me, too.
-Yeah, she's real pretty.

You're a lucky guy, Gardner.

-Hey, you got a picture of your girl?
-No.

I guess that leaves some unlucky girl
back at home, don't it?

I went with boys...
This boy had never acted before.

I went with boys from Southern towns,
small towns, people with accents.

I wanted to get as much of America
as I could in the picture.

Elias is good to Charlie,

establishes a relationship with him
out of just need,

because he knows that these guys
aren't gonna make it by themselves,

So he's trying to be helpful
in some minimal way.

Bear in mind that these men, you know,
are not bad, they're just tired.

And when you're very tired, you're irritable
and you're struggling for your own,

it's hard to take care of somebody else

who comes into the unit,
who doesn't know what he's doing.

So it's not like there is a badness,

a bad lynch-gang mentality here at all,

but they're just being ignored.

Lock and load!

Night ambush is something
we all never liked,

I mean, no matter how good you were.
You'd come out there every night.

You'd go out there from the perimeter
on the nights that you went out,

and it was spooky

‘cause anything could happen
out there at night.

That's an optical we laid in.

I wanted to get a sense of the rain
that was coming on,

‘cause I remember ambushes
where we'd sit in the rain all damn night

and be soaked to the bone.

This is one of those nights.

It happened to me right away,
early on in my stay,

where I was

on an ambush where I fell asleep,

as you'll see.

They wanted me to be just like them,

respectable, hard-working,
a little house, a family.

They drove me crazy
with their goddamn world, Grandma.

You know Mom.

I guess, I mean, I've always been sheltered
and special.

I just want to be anonymous,
like everybody else.

Do my share for my country.

Live up to what Grandpa did
in the first war, and Dad did in the second.

Well, here I am, anonymous, all right.

With guys nobody really cares about.

They come from the end of the line,
most of them,

small towns you never heard of.

That's Anthony Quinn's son.

Pulaski, Tennessee. Brandon, Mississippi.

Pork Bend, Utah. Wampum, Pennsylvania.

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 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.

Maybe that's why
they call themselves grunts,

‘cause a grunt can take it,
can take anything.

They're the best I've ever seen, Grandma.
The heart and soul.

Hey, Taylor.

Hey, cheese-dick, you're up.

-What?
-You're up.

Keith David as King,

who was also a fairly new actor,

and has just a great, Shakespearean
baritone voice.

He resembled so many guys that I knew
that were strong

and who were helpful to me in the field.
Helped keep me alive.

This guy was based on a guy I knew
from Texas, who was a real badass

and not very nice.

Looking through
one of these stupid scopes.

Any Vietnam veteran will tell you,
early on, from the '67 times,

how difficult to see
through these things at night.

They always would get wet
or smoggy or something, never worked.

So here we see a transition.
He's tired and he's...

The rain is stopping.
This is a dangerous time,

because the mosquitoes come out
on full force.

And they are serious mosquitoes
over there.

And you get bitten to death.
I hated those mosquitoes.

But it's one of my favorite voice letters...

Voice letters that he sends in the movie
to his grandma,

describing his feelings of being...
Wanting to be anonymous

and wanting to escape

from what he thinks is the fake Western life

that he had been growing up in,

and he wants to, sort of,
find out where reality is in his life.

Junior.

So he goes to the bottom of the barrel here
and he wakes up Mr. Junior...

It's your shift, man!

...who's played by Reggie Johnson.

Badass kid.

Reggie's obviously fallen asleep.

Chris Taylor, Charlie Sheen here, jumps up,

and he's just shocked awake.
He knows something's up.

Mosquitoes are eating him.

You can see the bumps on his skin.
Big bumps.

Everybody's asleep.
He doesn't know where he is.

Those mosquitoes are killing him.

Doesn't know what time it is.
Can't even see his watch.

Nice use of sound here

to create a tension and foreboding.

Mosquitoes are really so bad
that you really want to cover up completely

and hide from them with a towel, anything.

And at the same time,
you gotta keep your eye out.

Get hot under that towel. Miserable.

Moments there
that you thought, "My God."

You know,
you'd rather shoot yourself than go on.

And, you know, takes hours and hours
of ambush time,

just sitting there, sitting there.

Movie, of course, goes much faster,

So you have this whole problem
of reality versus movie time,

but things speed up in movies.

But you try to condense and give
a compressed reflection of the truth.

God, terrifying image to him.

He sees... Suddenly, for the first time
in his arrival in Vietnam,

he sees the enemy.

He looks at his claymore
and he can't reach it,

because he thinks that if he reaches for it,

it's gonna make noise
and they will hear it and kill him.

He's terrified.

He's looking at his grenades ‘cause
they told him to throw the grenades, too.

"Don't fire. Throw your...

"Blow your claymore, throw your grenades,
and choose your rifle.”

In that order. That's the standard policy.

He can't do any of it.
He can't call for his other men.

We put a wide-angle lens on the camera.
It looks like they're further away from him.

And the enemy is getting closer.

They're gonna see him any moment.

He's terrified. He's frozen to the spot.

He can't do anything. Nothing. He's dead.

Blow the fucking claymore!

What the hell happened?

Somebody blew something.
He doesn't know what it is.

It's all confusion now.
He can't blow the claymore.

The safety's on. He fucked up.

The other guy reaches over,
blows the claymore for him.

The claymore goes. He got one of them.

They're up there. He's firing. It's confusion.

Everybody's firing. No one knows
who's firing at what half the time.

And here's Tex.
He's going for his M60. He's firing.

He's got one of them somewhere,
he thinks.

Here he is, Sgt. McGinley.

He throws the grenade. Stupid idiot.

Blows Charlie Sheen away and Tex away.

Blows his arm off.

Often happened. Many of our casualties
were from friendly fire, not enemy fire.

Who knows how many? 20%, 30%?
I've heard higher estimates.

But this is a common condition of war
that is overlooked in war movies.

This is Tex. He's in pain.
Tourniquet comes on. That's Doc.

Now Charlie thinks he's dead.

He just felt the blood
coming off the back of his neck,

and as I did, I was shot that night myself,

I felt like I was dying. I got shot in the neck.

It's a scratch.

But it wasn't really a severe wound,
it was just a scratch.

So you never know.

No, I did not.

Big Harold, you keep an eye on him.
You don't let him go into shock.

Shut up!

Here.

Take the pain!

That's one of my favorite lines.
I try and remember it every day.

"Take the pain.”

Guys go into shock.
They die from shock, too.

Sometimes they die from internal bleeding.

They're smiling,
you put them on the helicopter,

and they're gone, you know?

Now we're looking...
They're looking for, you know, body...

I forgot the word. Blood trails.

They've found one.
He finds one, he shoots him.

That's Barnes.

He's not supposed to shoot him.
He could've gotten information out of him,

brought him in.

But Barnes has a vendetta
with the Vietcong.

Do you know if... If you're gonna die?

Do you feel like
everything's just gonna be fine?

He thinks he's dying. He's on morphine.

We're about to get out of here.

They gonna give you
three hot meals a day,

white sheets.

Them pretty white nurses.

Everybody dreamed about getting out
of the field, getting into the hospital.

White nurses when you're back.

The cocksucker fell asleep. He let them
walk right up on us and he don't do shit!

Junior blamed me.

The real Junior blamed me
for falling asleep on this position.

That is a point still in debate
in the historical texts right up till today,

but I think Junior fell asleep.

How long is...

Charlie thinks he's dying,
but he's not really.

And the other guy... The guy
who was really dying is his buddy, Gardner,

right here.

Now, Gardner is based on a guy
who was...

Not quite like this,

but the guy that I knew, Gardner,
was from the South,

and he was smiling
as we put him on the chopper.

And he died several hours later
of internal bleeding.

Nobody could believe it.

Here he dies pretty quickly, I'd say.

That's sort of the way we did it.
Sometimes they got carried away.

You know, you try to keep somebody alive
with noise and beatings and stuff,

and they're gone.
It's too bad. He was a good kid.

Everybody feels bad about it in the field.

And especially
if they think it's that guy's fault.

So he's gonna take the onus of the blame,

which I did,
and it's a hard thing to live with, too, but...

It's a lot of anger and irritation,
this particular ambush.

Remember what it looks like.

You fuck up in a firefight

and I goddamn guarantee you
a trip out of the bush

in a body bag!

Out here, assholes,
you keep your shit wired tight at all times!

And that goes for you, shit-for-brains.

You don't sleep on no fucking ambush!

On the other hand, Barnes...

...I catch copping "Z"s in the bush,

I'm personally gonna take an interest
in seeing him suffer.

It seems like Barnes knows and senses
that Junior could've screwed up, too,

and that's why he's giving him
that second look.

But he's putting the overt blame on Chris.

At this actual ambush, it was frustrating,

because we actually blew claymores,
shot up three NVA soldiers,

and we only found one body, I think one
long blood trail for several hundred yards,

and the third person just vanished,
So they were...

We began to think that they were
an amazingly supernatural type of soldiers.

Police up your extra ammo and frags.

In fact, you know, you could say that
there was something weird about them.

They had a tremendous resistance to death

and were very tenacious.

We took several wounded that night.
We were supposed to be ambushing them.

So,

I went back to the hospital in the rear,
I spent a couple of days,

and then I went right back out to the bush.

So this is the interlude back at base camp

where I get to know people
a little bit better,

because a wound kind of allows you in.

A wound takes you
into another level of the infantry.

You're more of a veteran.

Ambush scene that night

must have taken three,
four nights to shoot.

It was a tough one.

‘Cause the nights don't last that long.
We had rain, mosquitoes, real mosquitoes.

Bob Richardson, my DP, and I,
it was our first big film together,

and Bob was struggling with, you know,
lighting nights in the jungle.

It's not easy with very limited equipment.

Hey, King,
where'd you get those beers, boy?

We went with the idea of,
at least in the daytimes,

of a hard-to-see look in the jungle.

Nothing is overt, nothing is easy to see.

It's always hard to pick up, I mean...

We went with that look in the daytime.

Nighttime,
I think Bob was struggling more with it.

I think we have, you know...
I think sometimes it was too clear,

and, you know, you find that hard...

You have that difficulty at night.
Sometimes you see too little,

or do you see too much, you know,
and it's a hard margin to work.

This is based on the outhouse details
I worked on.

We always... Guys like me and these guys
always ended up on outhouse detail,

‘cause we were always in the shithouse
in some way or another.

And we'd take the barrels out from
the toilets and burn them with kerosene,

and philosophize as we did so.

These guys are mostly talking
about getting out of Vietnam,

which is an interesting issue,
because everybody had different dates.

I mean, if you were there for...
You had 360 days to go, or...

Sniff the pines.

Sniff that cross-mounted pussy
down by the river.

Hot damn!

Oh, yeah. Always dreams of home.

I mean, home never looked better
than in Vietnam.

Little motels in Georgia, or houses
in Mississippi, New York apartments.

I don't know,
anything seemed like a dream.

We all built up fantasy castles in our head

of what life would be like in the States
when we got back.

Guys went back to beautiful women
and found out they were in divorces

and had tremendous suicide problems.

It was like a second war at home
when we returned.

I tried to deal with that more
in Born on the Fourth of July.

I volunteered. I dropped out of college,

and told them I wanted the infantry,
combat, and Vietnam.

You volunteered for this shit, man?

You believe that?

You's a crazy fucker, giving up college.

It didn't make much sense.
I wasn't learning anything.

I figured why should just the poor kids
go off to war

and the rich kids always get away with it?

Oh, I see. What we got here is a crusader.

Sounds like it.

Shit.

You gotta be rich in the first place
to think like that.

Everybody know

the poor always being fucked over
by the rich.

Always have, always will.

Well, I guess by now you know

that most of the people
that went to Vietnam in the infantry

were mostly
from the lower economic classes,

and mostly draftees.

Very few middle-class kids went,
or upper-class,

because they were basically shielded
by a crazy set of laws

that provided that if you went to college
or had a psychiatric deferment,

you could get out of the war.

So as a result,

it never really became a democratic war
in that sense.

It was more of a class war.

And the pressure to end it did not come

from the parents of those
middle-class people who could have gone.

Because if they had gone
and started to die in any great number,

I believe that their parents
would have ended that war much faster.

This man here is Chris.
He been resurrected.

So, in the First Cavalry,
much later in my tour, actually,

I got a chance to...
Through King and some black friends,

I got into the hooches down below.

So they had these crazy bunkers
up in the First Cavalry

where guys would really design them.

And lights and neon,
sort of underground nightclubs,

and we'd smoke great dope,
great Vietnamese dope.

Pipes and all kinds of ways. Very inventive.

And this was a relaxant
and a great stimulant

and an alternative lifestyle
to a very dull and...

And angry day style, you know,
where a lot of people were drinking

and partying.

But here we had a chance

to bond with other people
and to talk about dreams

and keep sane, in a way.
Keep sane, keep human.

It was important to keep human there,

‘cause the place would deaden you
after a while.

And I'm very grateful

to these soldiers.
They introduced me to music.

That's where I started to hear
a lot of black jazz, a lot of Motown.

And The Doors, Jefferson Airplane.

I discovered Jim Morrison there,

in that underground bunker.

It was the late '60s, and acid was popular
in the States, and marijuana.

And people were starting to think
in different terms.

These soldiers, I would say,
were not politicized in any sense.

They knew the war sucked.
They had that feeling already.

And, you know,
Muhammad Ali characterized it.

"I ain't got no dispute with the gooks."
He said something like that.

With the Vietcong.
"I ain't got no dispute with the Vietcong."

And he went to jail for it.

And these guys all knew the score.

They knew that the war
was a lot of bogus political maneuvering.

They knew that the war
was a lot of bogus political maneuvering.

And...

But went along with it
and just tried to survive it

with dope, good dope,
and good friends and talk of home.

Guys here in the hooch didn't party so hard
down with us.

They didn't like us down there.
There was sort of a civil war in the platoon.

All them chucks be rapping
about how they losing they ho...

But a lot of these guys
were into boozing and country music,

both of which I kind of liked, too,

but I found that this group
was a little tougher

and did not approve of marijuana.

That's right, dude.

And thought anybody who did smoke it
was really...

Had his mind to the winds
and would be untrustworthy.

So there was some alienation there
in each platoon that I was in.

I was in four different units
and I saw it everywhere.

...everything kind of gets weird.
You know what I mean?

You hear that story about the gooks
putting chemicals in the grass,

so we don't fight, so we become pacifists?

Hey, but don't you worry, Bunny,
‘cause you's a killer anyway, man.

Yeah, but I still like a piece of pussy
once in a while.

Ain't nothing like a piece of pussy
except maybe the Indy 500.

Only way you get some pussy, man,
is a bitch dies and wills it to you,

and then, maybe.

How's it going, Bunny?

I think we had a lieutenant like this.
Nice guy.

But out of his depth here.

He was a, you know, all-star boy, nice guy.
He was killed.

Tried to be friends. Can't be friends
sometimes when there are people...

Lot of Confederate flags around.
Lot of good old boys.

Good soldiers, too.
Good poker players, too.

There was guys like Rodriguez.
Very quiet Spanish guy.

Just write home a lot.

-You need anything?
-No, sir.

Keep to himself and stay close to Jesus.

Poker was very popular. Lot of money.

Lot of drinking.

-Hey, what do you say there, L.T.?
-How you doing there, Red?

Not good. Not good.

This cocksucker's got every card
in the deck.

Sgt. O'Neill.

Now, there was a sergeant, a type like that,
that really gave me a hard time.

He was always assigning me
to the shit duty,

and he was always, like, coasting.
He never went out to the field.

He'd go out to the field as little as possible.
He would always, like, stay in.

Why's that, Lieutenant?

Barnes and Lieutenant are having a bit of a,

you know, territory struggle
for the platoon here.

I gotta run.

The lieutenants are nominally in charge,

but often the platoon sergeant
ran the platoon

because he was more experienced.

In this case, Barnes was based on a guy
I knew, I won't say who, from Montana,

who was in one of my units,
and I carried his radio.

He had actually been shot.

Yes or no?

I have to tell you,
that's precisely what I saw.

I mean, sometimes I just look at a guy,
and I know.

This fella's not gonna make it.

Just no fucking way.

-Yeah!
-I'm going now.

It's almost as if Barnes knows
O'Neill might not make it.

But Barnes had been shot
in the head, right?

An amazing, miraculous recovery.

And went to Japan for seven months,
reconstructed his face,

married a Japanese girl
and came back to the Nam.

Been wounded six, seven times,
something like that.

And he volunteered again.
He wanted to get out there Killing.

Tracks Of My Tears,
one of my favorite songs I found over there.

And...

Smokey just died, too. It was sad.

But this was a great song.
Just moved my heart.

And I remember dancing.
Guys would be dancing.

We danced with each other, you know?
It was a way to release this tension.

And it was a good thing.

It was a good thing, to party like this.
Kept us sane.

And some of the guys
would get out in the field...

You know, we'd go nuts sometimes
and wanna Kill the Vietnamese villagers

or people who got in our way.

And I think doing things like this
kept us more balanced

and kept us more human.

We wouldn't go out and kill people
So quickly, you know,

without respecting life a little more.

‘Cause I think respect for life
is ingrained in that music.

There's been a lot of movement
near the Cambodian border.

Regiments of NVA moving across.

And the sense of humor, too.

...firefights, ambushes.

We drop a lot of bombs,

then we walk through the jungle
like ghosts in a landscape.

We went through jungle like this a lot.

This is based on
a lot of the search-and-destroy missions

that we did.
And then you'd walk up in the jungle...

I was getting better on point.
You can see it there.

But you'd walk right up
on something like this,

and you wouldn't see it,
and it'd be right there in front of you.

Right in front of you, a bunker.

Where?

You wouldn't see it.

Could be six feet in front of you.

Could be an NVA soldier looking at you,
you wouldn't know it.

So it's hard to see in jungle.

So you have to trust your senses.
It's all visceral.

It doesn't... You know, it's not a place
for cerebral thinking.

It's not a place for cerebrics.

It's a place for radar.

You need radar, you need instinct,

and, you know, I think that there
are natural-born warriors, to be honest,

and I think some people
Just do the best they can.

Some people are dead
the moment they put on a uniform.

Don't make any difference.

This is an NVA base camp.

But you see how clever it is.
The production design was wonderful,

by Bruno Rubeo.

But it just folded into the landscape.

There's an entire little village here
that you can barely see.

Everything's tucked away.

And the soldiers move warily,

because we know
there'll be booby traps around here.

And they were just here.
You can see the smoke. And they just split.

We missed them by maybe a minute.

But they might still be around.

Bravo Six, Bravo Six, Bravo Two.

Be advised.
There is a bunker complex up front.

Turning right on our way down. Over.

See you next week.

Dafoe, character of Elias,
is also a tunnel rat.

I throw in a little bit of tunnel lore here.

I mean,
often the units would come out from the...

Other units would come out
and do the tunnel work,

but I took the liberty of getting right into it
and showing...

Elias was not really a tunnel rat, but...

Usually the tunnel rats
were very small guys

who would squeeze down in through there.

We built a tunnel complex
close to the jungle, which we shot in.

We had to. We...

We lost a Filipino crew member,
unfortunately, early on.

Trying to build a tunnel and it caved on us,

and he was killed.

And I was not in the Philippines
at that time,

but Bruno went to the...

There was offerings had to be made
to the village and to the spirits for his soul.

And the film was tough to shoot.

There were snakebites a couple of times

and there was a lot of, what do you call,

fatigue and flu

and colds and giving in to the...

Giving in to the...

To the roughness of the temperature.

On day 42, I remember standing out there.

I was one of the few left from the first crew
that was out there still.

We had a very bad day.
A lot of people didn't show up that night.

So I think we were calling in,
like, 70% sick on some days.

It was just... I was...
Basically, people were fatigued.

It wasn't game-playing. It was just fatigue.

This is a guy named John Glover
from Boston.

This is Richard Edson, who went on
to do some Jim Jarmusch pictures.

And he was also in the band
The Lounge Lizards.

Cross-cutting here, I think, was effective

to show the search build.

Something's gonna happen, but what?
You don't know.

And where, which incident?

Elias has stumbled
onto an underground tunnel here.

He's putting the flash on his face,

so you'll see him
as he makes the corner here.

Otherwise you would have been lost
in the dark.

He comes across
one of the wounded or dying. A dead NVA.

Charlie's on flank. He's guarding.

And this happened to me, too.

I think I was on flank in the rubber forest

and this huge, not huge,
but medium-sized crate snake, viper,

went right through my legs
and stared at me.

Made me... Took the wind out of me.

The other flank... That's Manny out there.
He's on the other flank.

Elias has spotted something,
feels something,

So he's working his way up the tunnel.

This is a tough scene to shoot.
Watch the timing.

Watch it. Watch it!

Maps. We had a lot of maps.

We dug up so much information
about them in these bunkers.

And then we'd send it back to,
you know, intel,

and they'd never do anything with it.
It didn't seem to add up.

We never got feedback, which is another
demoralizing thing in the infantry.

You wanna know... You know,
you make your objective, you keep it.

They'd ship us out after we took a place,
and then send us back 10 days later.

To take the same place,
we'd lose more lives, so...

Booby trap! Get down!

So he triggered a booby trap there.
You saw that one.

Medic!

That's Georges Delerue music.

We kind of went
with a Japanese style, there.

Oriental style.

That's a little dramatic license,

but he did manage to stumble out,

and it's a pretty horrifying sight.

He comes back from flank.
Something's happened.

God damn it.

We got...

You see a lot of dirty smoke.

The uniforms are really stonewashed.
I mean, they're dirty.

The towels, the sweat.

I mean, I think this attention to details
is very good.

Important. Some guys are strapped,
sometimes they're bare-chested.

I mean, there's a variety of individual styles
in the soldier,

and each one, the more you look at it,

I think a veteran could spot
some of this stuff,

but each uniform represents...

Is a statement, really,
of the way the person's attitude is.

And even the graffiti,

the choice of the graffiti on the helmets
iS important.

So we had to individualize
as much as possible.

Barnes is loved by his men
because he cares for them.

He has a military affection
for the hierarchy.

And it's clear
that he's emotionally involved

with the men who die.

Hey, where's Manny?

If anything, I would say that his moods
veer more towards death than life.

-Hey, Manny!
-Manny!

So, this NVA bunker sequence
took maybe three days to shoot.

And I really like...
Study the camera movements,

the choreography of cameras,
when you reveal people,

and I thought it was very nicely done.

Keep a sinuous,

almost serpent-like quality to the moves,

and reveals and pulling of racking the focus

and walking people in and out of frames.
Circling around.

As you saw, Manny vanished.

...some men to keep looking
and to wait for the engineers.

Missing in action. There were a lot of...

Not a lot, but there was a few MIAs,
you know,

and that happens in war.
We don't know what happened.

Manny was taken off the flank.
And here we reveal...

It was the end of the mystery.

...one of the more basic fears we all have,

of being captured and cut up
and castrated alone.

Indian country feeling.

This works on the emotions of the men,
obviously.

And you're gonna see the cause and effect,
as the Buddhists say.

You will see the results of this,
the effect of this, in the next scene,

when they will take out their wrath
on the villagers.

The motherfuckers.

Spare movie.

Love that sky.
Pink and dangerous, coming at you.

I love framing these landscapes.

Putting men into landscapes, into the far...
I love that always in movies.

And it's fun
to have guys all the way back out there,

200, 300, 400 yards from camera.

...our Captain Ahab.

He would set things right again.

Charlie's literarian quality.
That's the way I was.

I mean, he wrote about people
like Captain Ahab, so...

I love this shot. This is a toughie.

Great hit on the back. Timing is good.

You saw it. You got a real realistic feel
of how a shot goes.

Missed the first one. Probably got him
on the second or the third.

And it took...
You saw the delay in hitting him.

Timing-wise,
it's complicated to pull that off.

You gotta pop the squib at the right time.
But it was...

I had a terrific Filipino crew,

assistant directors and stunt guys

and special effects helpers
that were really terrific

with Yves De Bono on special effects.
Yves De Bono was an Englishman.

And he did everything, almost, first,
with his hands himself.

But nobody got hurt
in the special effects crew.

Move it!

Come on! Let's go!

Let's go, Junior. Bring them in.

We have some people down here.

Now, here's our village.

This one was a tough one,
because we had to build it.

We stocked it with as many Vietnamese
as we could get with a limited budget.

And we found some of these people
by total accident,

were tourists in the Philippines,
from Vietnam,

coming from South Carolina.

And had some money,
they were a bit rich tourists,

and they were traveling
through the Philippines.

We spotted them and grabbed them,

and grabbed this woman,
put her in the movie.

The first time she'd ever been in a movie.

She's actually an upper-class Vietnamese,
probably from Saigon,

playing a peasant woman.
But her English was...

She understood what I was saying.

We pulled people out of bunkers
all the time.

We blew the bunkers if they didn't get out.

The others didn't get out.
This is a tough shot, actually.

Vietnamese expressed their grief,
the way we remembered it in the villages,

very phonetically, very strongly.

They would seem almost like actors,
the way they would scream and yell.

And it irritated us more,

because we thought that they were fake.

Faking it, by the accentuation
on screaming and crying.

And as a result, we misunderstood.

What about me, man?

What about me?
I'm sick of this fucking shit.

Come on, motherfucker, move!

Watch this, fucker!

Fuckers don't want us here, man.

Who the fuck
do you think they're fighting for, huh?

I like Kevin Dillon very much.

He was the younger brother of Matt Dillon.

Very strong Irish-American features,
and very...

Had a coldness in him,

a cruelty that was true to the...

In a sense, the...

There was nothing more dangerous
in Vietnam

than a 19-year-old American
with a shotgun.

He exemplified that.
Did a wonderful job, performance.

Sergeant Warren,
you bring that honcho over here.

Now, here you see
the essence of the problem

in any village that we did find,

many links to the North Vietnamese Army.

The villagers were sympathetic to them,
and we didn't like them for that.

Some people would argue
that they didn't have any choice,

they had to store the weapons
and help the North Vietnamese.

But the fact is that
they were sympathetic to them

because the North Vietnamese
were fighting for their independence,

whereas we were perceived by them
as invaders.

You want something to smile at,
motherfucker?

I went nuts one day
against one of these poor guys.

An older man, who I shot at his feet,

because he would not listen to what I said.

I almost killed him in the bunker

and he wouldn't come out of the bunker,
and I went crazy on him.

‘Cause I just had enough
that particular day.

So, we're all in touch with our anger
at some point there. That's for sure.

And...

I didn't kill him, but came mighty close.
I'm glad I never did.

Whereas my friend Bunny...

I didn't see this. This is a dramatization.

But I know that he clubbed somebody
fo death.

You're real sorry, ain't you?

You're just crying your little hearts out
about Sandy and Sal and Manny.

Forget about it, Bunny, huh? Let's go.

What do you say?

This is a retard.

I wouldn't bring that up...

And Bunny...
We killed villagers at random everywhere.

I mean, it wasn't, like, something we did
as a policy by any means,

but it was, like, done in a way that...

You'd be walking in a village,
and if you called to somebody

and he didn't come when you told him to,
you'd shoot him.

Had the right to.

It depended on the mood.

I mean,
sometimes we were very friendly to them

and we would give them food

and make jokes with them, or...

Look at the scars on this gook honcho,
Sarge.

That's Johnny Depp in the middle.

It was one of his first roles.

I thought he was
a splendid-looking young guy.

He obviously...

I felt like he would become a star one day.

And it was fun to work with him.

He was very obliging.

He learned some Vietnamese
for this translator role.

And...

This scene, in a sense,
brings the whole focus

of the platoon together.

I mean, everyone runs up
fo see what's going on,

and we sense that there's some kind of
moral showdown about to happen here.

Who the hell was the gook
we nailed on the riverbank?

He doesn't know. He says that the NVA
ain't been around in a couple of months.

Look, maybe he was a scout or something,
Sarge.

Yeah, sure, a scout.

What about the fucking rice
and the weapons? Who are they for?

That cocksucker knows what I'm saying!
He understands. Don't you, pop?

-Goddamn right he does.
-You bet.

Damn it! He's lying through his teeth.
Come on!

That little guy's a rodeo rider from Texas.

That's Ivan Kane from the Bronx,
the fellow with the heavy beard.

He swears he doesn't know anything.

He hates the NVA,
but they come when they want,

-and they just take the...
-What's the bitch saying?

This is the essence of the problem,

is that the villagers all supported the NVA,
and we were going nuts

‘cause we never could get the hearts
and minds of the villagers.

We had basically...

We'd moved a lot of them off the land
into hamlets,

Strategic hamlets,
and those that were left on the land

were so brutalized by the bombings
and the defoliants

that by the time we got there,
they were terrified of us anyway.

I like the delay on that shot.

You know, that she takes that second
to be stunned.

And he just
couldn't stand her voice anymore.

She was driving him nuts,
and he decided to get to the point,

which is basically to terrify these people.

But what he does
is he really pisses the village chief off.

You're gonna see
the guy is very, very resilient.

Tell him, Lerner!

He intends to kill more.

Barnes has lost it,
partly because of the Manny killing.

And this is turning into a small version
of My Lai,

the My Lai Massacre,
the famous massacre of 1968,

the point being that these type of things
could happen very easily

in that heat and intensity.

100 degrees of sun, or 95 degrees,
and people get nuts.

You know, he gets nuts.
Your pride, your territory gets at stake.

You wanna show how tough you are
and how serious you are.

And the next thing you know,
you're Killing people.

It's easy to cross that line.

And here's Charlie.
He doesn't want to do it.

He wants to stop it,
but he doesn't have the guts

to go up against his sergeant.
Very few people would.

He's warning.

But he won't give in either.

Barnes!

So,

seemed like a good spot
to have Elias get us out of this hole

before we get into another My Lai.

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

Stay out of this, Elias.
This ain't your show.

You ain't a firing squad, you piece of shit.

-Get him!
-Get up, Barnes!

Elias! No, no, no!

Chief! Chief, tear his fucking head off!

The fight in the dust.

I always wanted to do something like that,
you know?

John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Red River.
Guys rolling in the dust. This was...

I love this shot.
These graphics with these...

The two sides of the platoon
are leaning in from both directions.

You sense, sort of, like,
almost a Homeric battle here

between two giants, Titans.

The men separating them.

Lookit there, you see...

He comes back at him. But no.
I love this, "Break it up.”

Come on, Elias, chill!

Look at the dust.

Look at this face here.

He looks like a silent film star
with those eyes.

Lights flaring off Elias. He's gone nuts, too.

Break it up! Shut up!

And now the Lieutenant emerges
as a force here.

At least he shows some determination.

You hear that?

Torch this place!

Blow the weapons in place! Round up
all suspected VC and shake it up!

Well, the village is
a legitimate NVA supply point, it seems.

...why the fuck didn't you do something?

What are you talking about?

You know what the fuck I'm talking about!

No, I don't. I don't know what the fuck
you're talking about, Elias.

That's a good shot here.
Barnes is obviously...

You know, this is a very strong...

It's an interesting legal point, you know.
If there had been a court-martial,

what would have happened?

There was so many of these incidents
that they were all buried.

Most of them were buried.

The occasional unlucky fellow
would get busted for killing a Vietnamese

and would go to jail,

but he would probably be
in the unlucky 5% or 2%.

On the other hand, it was a village
with known enemy sympathizers

and the orders were to torch it,

So you would get into this gray area,
this dilemma of

"Were the villagers
or are the villagers NVA,

“North Vietnamese sympathizers,

“allies, or are they not?"

Here they're putting
a white phosphorus grenade

in the rice storage bin.

That was one of the effective ways
to destroy the rice.

There's acid and fire in that grenade.

Here, they're grenading the well,

blowing out the water supply.

Here we are, herding the villagers.

This scene had a lot of impact on people.

People told me about it.

Especially...

The Barber comes in.

Here... I was in this situation.

It was another day, but I... Some of my...

I saved a girl once from being raped,
and killed, probably.

I thought this was a good time for Charlie
to show some colors.

Hey, come on.

Fucker. You fucker, get out of here!

Get the fuck off!

Don't do it! Don't do it!

You fucker! What is this, huh?

What are you, a homosexual, Taylor?

What the fuck is your problem, Taylor?
She's a fucking dink.

She's a fucking human being, man!

-Fuck you!
-Go fuck a cherry, Taylor.

Fucking animal!
All of you, you're fucking animals!

Fucking lame fuck!

You don't belong in the Nam, man.
This ain't your place at all.

You don't fucking get it, do you, man?

You just don't fucking get it.

That's the way it was.

Yeah, they didn't talk too much about it,
but they just didn't get it.

Some guys did and some guys didn't.

But Elias sees Chris behaving like this.
I think that's important.

Come on, guys. Police up your dicks
and let's get out of here.

So I said this scene
had some impact, right?

He's taking pictures.
A lot of us had cameras.

Guys were burning their village,
killing them,

but carrying them out
and taking care of them.

It's that strange bilateral relationship
we had with the Vietnamese.

Two different directions. Love, hate.

It's like the knuckles on Rhah's hand.

We got some great light in here.
I think you can see the sun on the grass.

It must be that magic hour around 5:00,

maybe 6:00.

The green is popping...
The sun's popping off the green.

And in the background, we blew the village.
Two cameras. You see that?

So here we are.
We're back in the perimeter that night.

And Elias and the Lieutenant
are explaining the situation

to the company commander, the Captain.

...as being witness to the shooting.

All right, Elias.

-Staff Sergeant Barnes?
-Sir!

I want a full report from you on this
when we get back to the CP.

You got it, Dai-'Uy, and I can throw in
plenty of eyewitnesses if you want, sir.

That's Dale Dye, my military advisor,

with a dye on his hair.

Dye is...

Several times in Vietnam, and very helpful

in remembering and outfitting an army

and helping me stage the military actions.

Now, we're going back into
that NVA bunker complex tomorrow.

This time from the East.

You people get some rest

and be back up here at the CP...

In this particular scene...
This is an interesting hinge to the film,

because he is telling Barnes

that he is gonna be...
The charges are gonna be looked into.

So now
Barnes does have something to lose.

If he... I mean, his career,
his military career, his promotions,

everything could be jeopardized

by an Article 15,
or a court-martial situation.

So there is something at stake going on,

but the Commanding Officer
doesn't wanna pursue it now.

Obviously, we're in the field. We're going
back into the NVA bunker complex.

Why? We always wondered why we had to
go back to places where we'd lost people.

Now, this is an interesting thing
that happened a lot.

We'd go back and circle around,
take more casualties.

Here you'll see the bloods talking together

and bitching about what the white man's
doing to them. It's the white man's war.

This shit is really getting out of hand, man.
It's going way out of control.

It seems to me
that you don't seem to know the difference.

And drugs was an issue, and also...

Towards the later part of my tour, in '68,

that's when I started to feel
there was much more racial dissension.

In my earlier part of the tour,
I didn't feel that at all.

I felt like they were more unified.

And I was befriended
by many black soldiers,

but I felt there was a lot of angry ones, too,

especially after Martin Luther King
and Malcolm X

were killed in the United States.

Ain't no need or time
for a courtroom out here.

Come on, let's go.

Barnes sums up his vigilante feelings
about war.

How'd it go there, Bob?

Yeah. Atta way, Sarge. Fucking Elias, man.

He's a fucking rat, that's what he is.

The platoon is really dividing now
over this issue at the village.

Half the platoon's going with Bob Barnes.
They're worried.

The other half is going with Elias.

But Bob is worried, ‘cause basically
and fundamentally he's a military man,

and promotions and rank
and all that stuff matters to him.

And he knows he's screwed if he gets
into a pissing contest in a legal situation.

...the stars.

Elias sums up his feelings
about the war here.

There's no right or wrong in them.

Put those stars in.

That's a nice way of putting it.

I couldn't, at that time, find an Indian actor

who conveyed to me
the essence of Elias successfully.

And I looked.
So I ended up casting a Dutch actor

out of New York. I was very impressed
with Willem's performance

in To Live and Die in LA,

and the moment I saw him,
I felt that he looked so evil

and seductive and interesting,

that I thought
that we could go the other way

with that, you know, sense of strangeness.

We're gonna lose this war.

Come on. You really think so?

Us?

We been kicking other people's asses
for so long,

I figure it's time we got ours kicked.

Day by day, I struggle to maintain
not only my strength but my sanity.

Chris continues writing home.

I have no energy to write.

But he stops writing here, he says.

I don't know what's right
and what's wrong anymore.

The morale of the men is low.

This is rain against sun. This is tough.

We were scheduled for rain. Too much sun,
but we lit it anyway. We shot...

I mean, the sun pops the rain out,
so we went with it.

But it's a strange look,
but it did happen in Vietnam.

We would occasionally have rain and sun.

Not much else.

Hope things are well, Grandma.

Tell Mom and Dad I...

Well, just tell them. Chris.

He sees a spider hole back here.

This is interesting,
‘cause he senses right away

there could be an ambush coming.
Somebody...

‘Cause anybody can get in that hole,
behind you or in between you.

That's what they want. They wanna get you
into crossfire situations.

Hey, big boy. I know you thought you had
that laundry gig...

I forgot about the leeches.
We had a lot of leeches.

Go right up your socks, into your socks.

Some of them, when it really rained a lot...
One time we got stuck...

Here's a leech on his face.

You'd see them everywhere.

They'd come right up on our...

Sometimes they'd come
right up your penis canal,

or your anal canal or your ears, your nose.

They get in overnight.

Some guys had to be evacuated.
He had an inflated leech in his intestine,

and they had to cut it out, operate him.

This is based on an ambush
that happened to me on January 15, 1968.

We got picked off like...

We took 35 wounded, I think,
four, five dead,

and we didn't even see one of them.

Johnny Depp in the lead.

Guy in a bunker.

You see there's an explosion right there.
They got him.

Those are mortars.
They're walking mortars in.

RPGs are gonna come next.

RPGs are rockets
and the most dangerous of all.

Charlie comes running up.

Good baseball slide there.

You see the mud.
He slid an extra three feet.

-Who's on point?
-Lerner and Warren!

He's trying to be a hero today.
I don't know why.

Maybe because of what happened
in the village.

Sometimes you become a hero,
you don't know why.

You give enough, you know,
you just get sick of it.

Good sound effects here.
Good thuds, good concussions.

This is sort of the pre-The Terminator era,

So we were still working
with a more primitive

sound effects system.

We've since enhanced a lot of the artillery

on Born on the Fourth of July
and Heaven & Earth.

This picture was done in a very quick mix,
actually, over at Ryder Sound

in Hollywood.

There's some good shots there.

Good relationship shots to bunker.

And here he is behind an anthill.
I ended up behind an anthill one day.

The mud. I love the mud.

Crawling up alongside a guy who's
been shot. Look at the way it's laid out.

He can't even read the goddamn compass.
That's one of the...

These are the practical considerations
people don't know.

You can barely read it. And your watch
gets clogged up, your compass...

He's gonna call in the wrong artillery.

He's gonna walk it right in on his own men.

I spotted a cut over there.

You're nervous, too.

Elias offers a strategy that makes sense,
to roll up the flank.

But he doesn't know what to do.
It's a tough call, too.

Where the fuck is Red platoon?

Tell those assholes to get up here!

How do you do when you get pinned down
like this? You got people behind you.

Listen to me, Barnes,
there's holes back here.

Third platoon's coming up here.
We're here.

Dinks get men in these holes,
they got us caught in a crossfire.

We'll shoot each other to shit.

Sounds pretty far-out to me, Elias.

That's what happened...
Yeah, that happened at la Drang.

They cut us to fucking pieces!

I need three men!

Then you got them. Take off.

Barnes sees the plan. He understands.

I don't wanna be stuck out there
with my ass hanging in the breeze.

You don't tell me how to run my war...

Barnes lets Elias go do what he wants.

Now, you go crying and rat fucking
the brigade on your own time!

But out here, you belong to me!
Now move!

You're an asshole, Barnes!

I don't know if Barnes has a plan
in his head. We don't know.

But it makes sense to spread out,
get somebody on the flank there.

Try to turn them.

Meanwhile, Chris is up front there.

He's being shot to shit
by this guy in the hole. Happened to me.

There was one...
I had an M79, so I couldn't even use it.

Doesn't fire at that close range,
So I was stuck up there without anything

except for grenades. I threw grenades.

The guy was popping up, you See.
Didn't know that he had a grenade.

It was in... That was his first Kill.

Or his first known Kill, anyway.

Now he's gone up to his friend,
Johnny Depp.

Meanwhile, King's been able
to get up with the M60.

You always need to try
to get that M60 up front.

You try to lay out some fire.
You got a lot of...

Modern firepower's very cutting
and it's intense.

If you can lay out...
The theory is if you can lay out fire,

you can cut your casualties in, you know...

Oh, shit, this guy is fucked!

He just looked up in time to see
his own artillery coming down on him.

These are some good shots.

Oh, man, that guy got buried with...
He got shrapnel all over his back.

And he's hot, you see,
‘cause you get shrapnel in your back, too.

You're really boiling.

Medic!

Barnes is taking out the shrapnel.

You see the smoke
coming off his shirt there. That's cool.

-God!
-Medic!

Shoot.

It's horrible to be in artillery and bombs.

He trips the satchel.
That's what happened to me.

A friend of mine...
Not a gunner friend, a guy I was with...

Great shot.
A guy I was with tripped a satchel.

I got wounded my second time
on January 15th.

I got shot in the...

Shrapnel in the legs and the ass, actually.

So they're trying to regroup in the back
here. Get their wounded back.

-You okay?
-Don't leave me, man.

This is a sad scene for Chris. He's...

He knows his friend is really in bad shape,
may not make it,

and it inspires Chris to...

In a strange way,
to get back into the fight and make good.

You know, a sense of vengeance sets in,

and, as often the case of...
Brings out the heroism.

Chain reaction, cause and effect.

Barnes is really pissed off at the Lieutenant
for doing this.

You ignorant asshole!

What the fuck coordinates you giving?

You wasted a lot of people up there
with your fucked-up fire mission!

You know that? You know that?

Puts his helmet on the wrong way.

That's mosquito repellent on the helmet
there, on that helmet band liner.

Check your fire! Check your fire!

Meanwhile, Elias is out on flank.
He's trying to turn the flank.

He's got Charlie Sheen with him
and Francesco Quinn,

who's Anthony Quinn's son.

And Chris Pedersen.

Stagger yourself across this line.
Shoot anything that moves.

They'll be coming from over there.

Elias feels that
they're gonna try to come in between

the two platoons.
They're gonna have a bigger day.

They're gonna really
wipe out two platoons here,

So it's an important action that he does.

...in case they try to flank us.

Third platoon's coming up to our rear,
so watch for them.

Hey. Can I go with you?

No. I move faster alone.

You can get stuck up there
for, like, two, three hours sometimes.

They just wait and they'll bait you.

We tell everybody to pull back
to the church.

We link up with third platoon.
You got that?

What about Elias?
If we pull back, he'll be cut off.

You just haul ass, too, Lieutenant.
I'll get him.

Rain's stopping.

A few minutes have gone by. Lot of fog.

I like jungle fog. They're coming, all right.

And these four guys
are gonna try to stop them.

Now, this feels pretty good.

‘Cause you've been nailed all day,
and then you get them.

So these guys are really excited.

-I got two of them fuckers, man.
-I got one!

Ho Chi Minh sucks dead dick!

I mean, you go a little crazy there.

This could be a long, frustrating war.
You don't see them often.

And when you see them and you get them,
it's amazing.

It's like fishing or hunting,
except you're dealing with human lives.

You realize it later in your life,

but right then and there, when you're a kid,
it's part of the game.

Sarge, there's a bunch of gooks
came through there.

We got three of them fuckers.

Hey, didn't you hear the arty shift?
We're pulling back.

So Barnes is shifting the artillery,
he's pulling back the troops,

and he's got Elias out there.

I'll get him!

You get Crawford in now,
before I article 15 both your asses. Move!

Move it.

This was shot all in a rainforest right
outside Manila, not too far from Manila.

We had a kung-fu ninja film
shooting next door,

So occasionally we'd look over and we'd
see a Chinese guy flying through the air

in a black pajama off a trampoline.

We built a... One of these...
Some of these shots,

if you look closely,
we built a dolly here in the jungle,

that was about 90 feet long, 120 feet long,

and we just whipped it through there.
I mean, it's a hard dolly,

‘cause this jungle is not even-layered,

So we had to put a lot of,
you know, compensations in on the dolly,

and boy, we were flying down these tracks.

These guys are really running.

They're trying
to get in between the American platoons.

Elias is the only thing
that can prevent them from doing so.

And he's running counter-direction,
you see, left to right, right to left.

They're coming. He's coming.

That's a tough shot in the jungle.

And they are running, these guys.

And boom, they meet.

And Barnes is also stalking, as you can see.

Barnes is stalking him left to right

and now he turns
and he goes back, right to left,

indicating that he's picking up
on something on Elias in another direction,

that Elias is circling.

You can hear on the soundtrack

some interesting
Georges Delerue Japanese-style music,

indicating the spookiness and mystery
of this jungle.

Meanwhile, back at the perimeter,
they're restocking,

putting the wounded and the dying in.

This is a mess. It smells. It's awful.
People are shot, dying, screaming.

Charlie goes back out.

That's a cool shot, moving through bush
on a track. Coming in on him.

Here he is. This is cool.
We laid mist on the floor.

And he thinks it's an NVA.
Now he realizes...

He thinks, "It's Barnes. Okay, he's okay."
He smiles. Barnes lets up. "Oh, it's Elias.”

You see, he didn't even decide until now.

"Good friends, right?" "Right, Jack."

Elias gets it. So does Barnes.

Can't hesitate when you're a warrior.

I don't think he even planned it.
I think it's an interesting equation

that grew out of this coincidence
that Elias got stretched out.

And Barnes just took advantage
of that situation.

Get rid of the trial, too.

Now, he didn't count on this punk.

Elias is dead. Fall back with the platoon.

Get going.

Tom Berenger seems to have
a bit of a guilt complex there.

Charlie is really...

Doesn't know what to do,
to go with him or try to look for Elias.

It's hopeless to look for him.

A nice reverse dolly is in there,
kind of going in on Chris

and reversing to Barnes.

This sequence coming up was really
tough to shoot. We were in choppers,

in and out, on the ground,
above the ground.

This is a tough one. Bodies moving
towards the chopper for evacuation.

Wind, no wash.

Good wounds, good makeup.

And a lot of...
All of these guys, they really are struggling.

Some of them are getting out, though.
They're happy.

Some of these actors are finishing today,
you know, too.

We shot in sequence.

So they're getting home, going home.
They're getting out of this mess.

Yeah, that happened a lot.

Wash would knock off the bodies.
That's great makeup on those dead bodies.

There's a good shot coming up.

Yeah, I told them, "Lift him, just lift him.

"I don't care how you get him up. Just
drag him. Make it awkward. Make it ugly."

It's hard, carrying guys.

Faces are good, though.

They got that rigor mortis 00K.

Charlie's got a defiant new graffiti
on his helmet, if you notice.

And that's Forest Whitaker, there.

He's happy. He's getting out.

Big John, he's getting out of the field.

Now, this is a tough shot.

Look at how close we are to the chopper
on that one. You were right on top.

Now we're nailing around.
We're coming around on a dolly.

Picking this up, that's pretty dangerous.

Plus, we got a lot of explosions
near the choppers.

The Filipino Army
really went out of their way to help us,

but the US Pentagon, of course,
thought the script was unrealistic

and told us that they would not cooperate.

These are tough shots. There's Dale Dye,
shooting out the back. He's getting out.

This is a tough one, too, ‘cause we had
a lot of people in this chopper.

I remember we almost...
This is where we almost bought it.

You see about six, seven people
in this chopper.

Look at that down there. That's cool.
The NVA are coming up.

We were too many people...

With the camera equipment,
the sound equipment,

there's just too many people
in this chopper.

We almost went right into the side
of the mountain there on the ravine.

But... There's a slow-motion shot.

"Back down, back down,
go back down there."

‘Cause they got Elias there.
You see, they just spotted him.

He wasn't killed by Barnes' bullet.

So I got a little operatic here.

Obviously, Elias didn't die this grandiose,

but what the hell, it's only a movie.

This is interesting.
We have the NVA shooting at the...

Keeping the air support
from getting too close,

and they're getting blown to smithereens.

The squibs in the ground,
that's tough. Complicated.

Great shot, though, with long lens.
Seeing them in the background.

Double, triple actions.

But they are keeping the choppers off.
Here's a really beautiful wide shot.

It's shot from another chopper
over the church getting in the frame.

You see that second chopper flying over.

You get a sense of the madness of this.
And here...

Ironically, this became our poster.

That's a tough snatch of sky.
We couldn't do it,

but it was a great shot. Great try.

That's... What a beauty, too, of Elias.

And Charlie knows. He knows.
So does Bob Barnes.

He... Elias didn't make it back
to base camp.

This is a good shot,
coming into the base camp.

That's a 6:00 magic hour shot.

The heads are back in the hooch,
and they're pissed off about Elias' death.

And as the war progressed
in the '68 period,

there was much more fragging
that was going on.

Sergeants and sometimes lieutenants
were aftacked.

There was dissension in the troops,
there was mutinies.

And, you know, already,
with a large amount of friendly fire

that had occurred, and casualties,

this was another added burden.

And there was a tremendous amount
of demoralization

based on Johnson's withdrawing
from the war in March.

Lyndon Johnson said
that he would not run for office,

and that was it, basically.

From that point on, every infantryman
knew that the game was up

and it was just a question of survival.

And demoralization set in,
more drug usage,

more race war

and questioning.

Not an openly overt question
as to why we're there,

but just sort of an underlying feeling
of disease.

...'cause he done left his pains down here.

You're wrong, man.

Any way you cut it,
Barnes is a fucking murderer.

Right on.

Taylor, I remember
when you first came in here...

Rhah was a country boy
from South Carolina,

an interesting sort of Robert Mitchum-
Night of the Hunter character,

who really nailed me a couple of times,
told me things I didn't wanna hear.

But good country sense,
good sense of what to do in combat.

And he's saying to me here, basically,
not to go against Barnes.

Take a little bit of dramatic license.
Barnes never confronted us like this,

but for the purpose of this scene,

I decided to walk him right into the hooch,
right into the head hooch.

And it became
one of Tom's favorite scenes.

One of his best.

Y'all experts?

Y'all know about killing?

I'd like to hear about it, potheads.

Barnes was not a person
who liked potheads at all.

Why do you smoke this shit?
So as to escape from reality?

But...

Me, I don't need this shit.

I took the liberty with this.
I did the scene to push it.

And they're coming to a head here,
coming to a conclusion.

I am reality.

There's the way it ought to be.

And there's the way it is.

That's the kind of feeling we had, that...

Elias was full of shit.

Charlie was an idealist.

Elias was a crusader.

Now, I got no fight

with any man who does what he's told,

but when he don't...

He's talking to Charlie, not to Elias.

And when the machine breaks down,
we break down.

There's some truth to that.

And I ain't gonna allow that...

Any commander will tell you.

Not one.

Elias had an element of individuality

that works against the machine.

Y'all love Elias.

Oh, you wanna kick ass.

Most Americans that I talked to
sided with Barnes in this dispute.

Well, here I am, all by my lonesome,

and ain't nobody gonna know.

Six of you boys against me.

Kill me.

Well, you don't often respond
to that kind of provocation.

It's a provocation that's hard to resist.
Chris falls for it.

And he's not the street fighter
that Barnes is, and he loses quite quickly.

Give it to him! Whoop his ass. Come on.

Yes, man.

-Come on, man! Go.
-Get him!

-Oh, fuck, come on.
-Get him, Chris. Come on.

I find this scene a little bit melodramatic
in hindsight.

I'd probably do it differently
if I were directing it now.

But...

Ten years,
you'll climb the fucking walls, man.

Barnes, of course, thinks about trials,

thinks about the system. He can't do it.

Takes Charlie's cherry, in a sense, there.
Warns him off.

Death?

What do you all know about death?

Couldn't resist this line.

Of course, it's a little bit melodramatic,

but I just couldn't resist that kind of thing.

He's a little drunk, as you can see.

He bangs against the crate, there.

So he might be presumed
to say something like that.

I felt that about Barnes, you know,
that he had those dead eyes.

He'd been to death,
he'd been back across the gulf.

That's what gave him his power over men.

In this scene, we're returning to the same
area where we'd been ambushed before,

and this is a very bad feeling.

It's sort of like going back down
into one of the bardos.

Past the church.

It's a flashback.

Past the church where Elias died.

See, I built this two-battalion perimeter
for the film

because we wanted to...
I wanted to match this battle I had

on January 1, 1968.

We were about two battalions,
but weak battalions, not fully loaded,

and we were hit
by 5,000 North Vietnamese.

Somewhere out there
was the entire 141st NVA regiment.

It was near a place called Suoi Cut,

on the Vietnamese maps, S-U-O-I-K-U-T.

It was called Firebase Burt, B-U-R-T,
by the Americans.

And it was some hell of a firefight.

There wasn't much written about that.
In fact, I never saw it written about

in any military history.

It was sort of ignored.
It was a strange thing.

And years later, I finally
ran into some veterans of that night,

and they told me
incredible stories about it.

So I knew that it had happened
and, for a while there after the war,

I doubted my own sanity.

I thought it may have been an illusion
and I had a dream,

but I know that that fight happened.

...fucking Cambodia right now.

Cambodia? Man, you kidding me.

You wanted to see me, sir?

Yeah, Ramucci.
Looks like you got Elias' squad now.

Squad, sir?

I didn't know we were still referring
to this platoon in terms of squads.

All right, look.

I want you to take those two holes
right there and there.

Well, by this time,
the Lieutenant's really toughened up,

but as you can see, he's toughened up
in a sort of negative way

and frustration is high

and represents...

Every platoon, every company
was undermanned by January, February.

Been a lot of wounded being shipped out.
A lot of people went to the rear.

So we were carrying, you know,
two men on foxholes all night.

Sometimes we'd be up half the night.

-I just don't give a flying fuck anymore.
-Right.

Well, here you see King
putting out a claymore mine

and you see an ambush patrol
going out at the edge of night.

Near... For night ambush.

And people are pretty down here.

King is going home any day. He's pissed off
because he's still out in the bush.

You know, he should be back in the rear
at this point. He's got, I think, 10 days left.

What's the matter with you, man?

How come you ain't writing nobody?

What about your folks?

That grandma you was telling me about?

Girl?

I sense that Chris has changed.

He doesn't need to write,
doesn't want to write anymore.

Doesn't believe anymore.
That must trouble him.

You been smoking too much of this shit,
troop.

Grass puts you in another head.
Changes your reality.

Very rarely would we smoke in the field,
I think once or twice, like this,

but it was an extreme circumstance.

Just keep your pecker hard
and your powder dry,

and the world will turn.

"The world will turn."

I think it's an expression we got
probably from Mexico,

a mezcal bottle.

The worm inside the bottle.

Things change.

...making up the rules any way they want.

So what do we do?
Sit in the middle and suck on it.

Charlie continues to be an idealist
in a situation that...

I don't know.
Why do we have idealism in war?

I don't know. It's insane.

It's a no-win proposition.

And why do we dramatize it?
And why do we like it? There's drama.

Hey, King, collect up your shit.
Your orders just come through.

Reality is that there's very little idealism.

What do you need, a written invitation,
for Christ's sake?

Mostly functional.

The lifers have made a mistake.

Turning the knobs at Auschwitz,
So to speak.

You got 10 minutes to make
the last fucking chopper out of here, man...

Everybody's pissed.
He got the chopper out.

A late-night lift into town, or something,
and you'd get out.

That's great, King. I'm happy for you, man.

-You take it on home for me, okay?
-Yeah.

You got my address.

‘It's a nice look in Charlie's eyes.
Really going to...

He has a friend in life.
That's a hard thing to get.

He's gonna miss this man, Fitzgerald.
He's going back to Tennessee.

Humboldt, Tennessee.

Remember now, take it easy.
Don't think too much.

Like a mother.

Remember, ain't no such thing
as a coward out here. Don't mean nothing.

My man.

Power handshake.

But it was felt.

Gonna miss a guy like that.

You don't ever get in that same situation
in the States, you know?

Sometimes you did cross skin...

Racial barriers.

I'm pretty fucked up, Sarge!

And it was the best, that relationship,

without any of the ideology
and the bullshit.

A lot of guys would put mosquito repellent
on their feet, like Junior just did,

and get the hell out of the field,

because they sensed
some shit was coming.

So their feet would swell up.

...I catch you spraying
skeeter repellent on your fucking feet,

I'm gonna court-martial your nigger ass.

Well, then court-martial me,
motherfucker!

Fuck my ass.
Send me to fucking Long Binh!

You do your fucking worst!

You white folks have got
your last klick out of Junior!

-O'Neill, get me that centipede.
-Sergeant?

Yeah, that long, hairy,
red and black bastard

I found in the ammo crate.

I'm gonna put it in this boy's crotch,
see if he can walk.

I remember now.

Hey. Now hold up, man!

You just hold up and wait, all right?

Fuck it! I'll walk! I'll fucking walk, man!

Fucking pussy, man.
Hey, Sarge, I got to have him in my hole?

Yeah.

Barnes seems a little drunk here.

But anything you could do
to keep a guy in the field, you had to.

I can't take it no more.

We were short on men.

Even Sergeant's trying to get out here.

Bob, I got Elias' R&R.
It's coming up in three days, here.

I was thinking about going to Hawaii,
maybe see Patsy.

Hey, Bob, come on, I never asked you
for a fucking thing over here.

You know, I was thinking maybe...
Well, to be honest with you,

I was hoping you'd put me
on that chopper with King out of here.

What do you say, chief-a-rooney?

I can't do that for you, Red.

We need every swinging dick in the field,
and you know that.

Hey, Bob, come on.
You can talk to me, for Christ's sake.

All I'm asking for is three fucking days,
here.

I am talking to you, Red,
and I'm telling you "no."

So get back in your foxhole.

Bob, I got a bad feeling on this one,
all right?

I mean, I got a bad feeling.

I don't think I'm gonna make it out of here.

You understand what I'm saying to you?

Everybody got to die sometime, Red.

Hard lines.

There's something very pathetic
about Sgt. O'Neill.

He's always a bully,
pushing other people around, and...

In deciding what to do with this character,
you're gonna see, I...

Instead of killing him off,
I guess would be the typical thing

in a platoon movie would be...

I reversed it and let him live,
but with a different set of consequences.

Goodbye, motherfuckers!

But I love that exit. It's so cool.

Straight up.

Where's that fucking ambush?

They ain't even waiting till later.
It's fucking coming now, man.

Right fucking now.

You know, Junior,
some of the things we done, man...

I don't feel like we done something wrong.

I always loved this act of contrition
on the part of Bunny,

as if he isn't quite able to put his finger

on what his concept of hell is like,

but he certainly feels the flames of it.

I love this existential explanation
of his philosophy,

which is when you die,
you don't feel it anyway,

So you can do anything you want
while you're alive.

It makes sense.

It makes sense for an American teenager.

Don't you worry, Junior.

You're hanging with Audie Murphy here,
my man.

Bravo Three, Bravo Three...

This could have been even scarier.
I didn't have the right light,

but this is supposed to be
the edge of night.

Okay, Three Alpha, now calm down, son.

I'll get you a fire mission ASAP.
Smoke will be first.

Lieutenant's dead.
Radioman looks dead, sir.

This could be
a potentially very scary conversation.

I'm not sure I succeeded as a director,

in that I just wanted to feel the horror
of the ambush through the radio.

Never see the disembodied
kind of effective horror

of an ambush,
a platoon being wiped out, overrun.

But I missed it.

Here, Barnes has given the Lieutenant
a little grin.

I love that focus pull.

But Barnes is digging
the oncoming tension.

Three Alpha Six. How about those rounds...

Now, obviously, the ambush is gone.
They're not responding.

This should have been, really,
later in the day. I just...

Given the budget we had
and the conditions,

we just had to grab what we could
when we could.

We were running out of...

This was towards the end of the schedule
and we were running out of time.

Shit.

In struggling to deal with
how do we light this huge battle at night

with a limited amount of time and money...

We didn't have the money
for the lighting, certainly.

We decided to go au naturel,
in the sense that we...

In Vietnam,
I remember everything was lit by trip flare,

by night flares and artillery.

So Bob Richardson, our cameraman,
Just adventurously decided

to light the whole thing with flares.

Okay. Ready and...

Here he trips a flare. This is important.

This sets off the ambush.
We know that they're out there now.

And at the same time, you're gonna see
that it's an American soldier

who comes back into their purview.

And they're shocked, because
he's coming right from the ambush.

This happened to us.

It's one of the most frightening things,
is to see one of your own men

fleeing naked, almost naked,
through the jungle,

and throwing away his equipment
and terrified at what he saw out there.

It makes you wanna run out of your foxhole
and leave it.

You know, we're not superheroes here.

This is a very frightening position,

‘cause you're isolated
from your other troops.

You're only two men in the foxhole,
first of all.

That's very low.
You should be, like, three, four men.

And you're lonely and you're scared.
You don't know what's out there.

That's Corey Glover.

He became the lead singer
of The Living Color.

A very, very sweet-voiced young man.

Plays a nice friend of Chris' called Francis
in the movie.

That's the sound, I believe, of mortars.

It could be mortars
or it could be flares popping.

But that empty, hollow thud,
it was an interesting sound.

Nothing. Silence.

There goes another trip flare.

And a claymore goes, it looks like.

No, it's an American soldier.
It's very confusing.

That's the American soldier
I was talking about.

That's scary. He says, "Don't shoot.”
He's speaking English.

It's the ambush. Over here, man. Hurry.

You can see it's all lit by flares.

It goes dark, goes light, goes dark.

He comes in. He smashes somebody.

Hundreds of them, moving this way!

Bloody. Like football injuries.

They wiped us out, man!
We didn't have a chance!

-Where's the CP?
-Back there.

Can't hear what he's saying.
He's just screeching. He's terrified.

They ain't stopping for shit!

There's a lot of rumor like that. It hits
the radio, guys come up, they tell you stuff.

"Should I get out of there?” Now, Charlie
displays a hell of a lot of courage here,

Just staying, sticking it out.

Tendency would want to be to split.

There, there. You see the NVA over there.

He blows his claymore. This is...
He blows them maybe too fast.

He blows all three.

Puts up a lot of fire.
Now he's revealed his position, though.

Nice tracers on those...

Tracer effects were very expensive for us.
We tried to use them sparingly.

They got spotted, you can see that.

They got some kind
of a concussion grenade, I think.

Knocked the shit out of him.
That's a good shot.

Knocked the shit out of him, but he's okay.

But they've been spotted.
They know where the bunker is.

No. Hold it. Hold it.

Here's a whistle. Something weird
is going on. There must be more men.

See the flares
bouncing off the trees, there?

Great shadow effects.

NVA on the loudspeaker.
That's even more terrifying to the mind.

I can't say I ever heard it myself.

He knows they're in the hole and to get out
because they're gonna get bombed.

Figures there's an RPG rocket
coming in on him.

This is a great shot, getting out of...

Look at the way he distorts in the shadows.

But he's smart to get out. You don't wanna
be in the hole once you've been spotted,

when they got heavy, superior firepower
on you.

And there it goes. That's an RPG.

I shot that shot.

I stood right in there with a glass shield
and did it. That was great.

Blew the whole bunker. That is scary.

RPGs are dangerous.

This is a little melodramatic.
Private Charlie goes nuts.

He goes storming back into the...
NVA are sweeping over the hole.

Charlie goes right out there
and takes them on.

It is John Wayne.
I can't say that I was even close to that.

But he's incensed. He's not...
He's on another planet right now.

And Francis shares it.

You know, he gets swept up in it
and they go in there.

And not only does he go back into the hole,

but Charlie goes nuts
and goes down the hill and after the NVA.

He's gone. He's gone. He's out of his mind.

It's possible.

In another position, Bunny is out of...

He's down to his last shells.
He's got a shotgun. Junior's freaked out.

He's really scared.

Bunny's gone. Junior wants out.

And here he goes. I don't blame him.

But he... It's dark
and he runs right into a fucking tree.

Knocks himself out.

Bunny gets it right in the chest.

And so does Junior.

It's a bayonet.

It was hand-to-hand
that night on the bunker,

on the perimeter. So...

Shovels were used.
It was down to the wire.

C Company was...

Entrenching tools were used.

This is Barnes. He's fired a LAW.

A shoulder-fired... Shoulder rocket.

And he's trying to retake the perimeter.

There's McGinley.
He's... Sgt. O'Neill is scared,

and he buries himself underneath
a dead body, and he's missed.

The NVA come, sweep past him,

and they leave him for dead,
and he makes it.

So, reluctantly, I stepped in as the Major,
played him.

That was a younger me.

I look so much younger.

But about the right age for a major
in the bunker, Central Command.

There's my staff sergeant.
He's a big, fat drunk.

And the NVA are in the perimeter,
you can see.

They got in, as they did that night.

And they have a satchel charge,
and he's a suicide mission.

There he goes, and there I go.

That's a big one.

There, Major's bunker is all gone.
This is amazing.

The Captain is stunned.
He is now on his own.

Central Command is disorganized.

This is a platoon sergeant.
They're all confused. That's the Lieutenant.

Everything's breaking down.
Chaos. Disorder.

Get him in!

They don't know who's alive, who's dead.

They're coming through all over!

Lieutenant is stunned
to hear that Barnes may be dead,

So he doesn't have any support
from his staff NCO.

He has to make his own decision. He's lost.

He wants to pull back.

The Captain tells him,
"Where are you gonna pull back to?"

It's a good point.
This is an amazing shot, lit by a flare.

You see quite a huge perimeter,
staging of action.

Simultaneous artillery flare.

NVA are overrunning here.

This is a little...

Quite a big shot. I probably... It's overdone.

You know, they didn't overrun it
quite this way, they'd be further apart,

but you wouldn't be able to get it on film.
You would be all over the place.

So I had to concentrize the perimeter.

Make more bodies visible
than would be normal in a battle.

Here's a great shot, too. Really big.
Looks like the Civil War, almost.

The Captain is beside himself
and he is gonna call in his air strike

on his perimeter. He has no choice.

For the record, it's my call.

Dump everything you've got left
on my pos.

I say again,
expend all remaining in my perimeter.

It's a lovely fucking war. Bravo Six out.

So, they're coming down now.
I think it would be a Phantom or...

Yep. Here they come, out of the sky.
This is a process shot.

We had a fly-over by...

No, this is an actual jet
from the Filipino Air Force.

And Barnes is really into it. He's got
his entrenching tool and he is taking it on.

He's insane.
He gets shot in the thigh. Keeps going.

And he's saved here, actually, by Charlie,
who comes roaring down into his foxhole.

Charlie's gone nuts, too.

But Barnes doesn't seem to even know
what's going on.

He goes right back to work,
grabs another NVA and starts killing him.

Charlie yells for Barnes,
trying to help him, trying to...

Or is he? Barnes doesn't pay any attention.

Could be an NVA,
doesn't know the difference, goes for him.

There it is. That's the war, right in his eyes.

And Charlie is saved by his own airplanes.

Bomb goes off on the perimeter,

blasts Barnes out of there, blasts
the whole damn perimeter, takes it to hell.

blasts Barnes out of there, blasts
the whole damn perimeter, takes it to hell.

Both sides.

Went to an early form
of black-and-white here

and brought back the color
as Charlie's consciousness returned.

That dawn was miraculous
to us on the perimeter,

those of us who'd survived.

And I remember the concept
of somehow the deer being there,

that I would wake
and there would be a deer,

some sign of fresh life out there.

It's the first thing he'd see.

Getting that Filipino deer
to do anything was tough.

They don't have many deer out there.

The next morning
was probably the most vivid for me,

‘cause we went out
and there must have been

500, 700 dead North Vietnamese.

We put them into pits, mass graves,

and we had about 25 dead

and 175 wounded of our own.

So about 200 guys went down
out of 600, 700.

Significant casualty rate that night.

So, Charlie's tracking Barnes.

He owes him one.

Get me a medic.

Go on, boy!

No hesitation.

Do it.

He did it.

I never shot my sergeant,
So rest assured that...

My feelings were such that

I would have shot Lt. Calley,

if I could have.

The man who massacred
the people at My Lai.

But I think Charlie's acting out of
retribution, really, for what he did to Elias.

And I think Charlie has bitten off
a fairly large responsibility by that action.

Look down here. Check them out.

Come on, EImo. Move your flea-bitten ass!

Once you become a Killer like that,

it haunts you for the rest of your life.

Can you walk, huh?

We had guys, of course, like...

The APC units were notorious
for being dirty and for being...

Having a lot of Nazi memorabilia

and for scalping VC and NVA.

So they would come up and support us.

We were infantry.
They were a little different than us.

And they were certainly out there.

Here's a guy who's stabbing himself
in the thigh ‘cause he's about had it,

and I don't blame him.
I mean, a lot of guys did that.

Yeah.
That must have been some fucking fight.

It was rough.

The Sergeant, the Cowardly Sergeant,
Bert Lahr, made it out of there.

The bunch of fucking faggots,
they all left me.

Here's a guy just took an ear.
Those guys are scalping.

Well, here's Rhah.
He made it through with his walking stick.

He's walking around, checking out
the bodies getting scavenged.

The 25th Infantry there, you see that.

He finds something,
looks like either opium or heroin,

off an NVA soldier.

These are the mass graves
that we buried them in.

He's going out on morphine.

That's Charlie.

Good shot.

You get a sense of the bodies
and the movement.

Moving towards the exit.
The helicopter's taking them out.

There's the... There's Dale Dye.

It's a true moment for Dale.

That's where his feelings come out
about his troops

and his losses.

Hey, Taylor, that you?

Francis made it. He didn't think so.

Hey, Francis.

-Hey man, how you doing?
-I'm okay. How you doing?

Fine, man. Just fine. Hey, dig it.

We two timers, man.
We're gonna get out of here, boy.

I'm gonna see you in the hospital.
We gonna get high, high...

Twice wounded and you're out.

For at least that... I was out for a while,
then I went back in at my own volition.

Well, that's good.

Meanwhile, the Cowardly Sergeant,
because there's nobody left,

now inherits second platoon.

Which means that inevitably
he will, too, probably meet his match.

Here goes Francis. Here goes Chris.
And we're out of here.

Thank God.

It was sad.
You say goodbye to your friends.

The last time you see most of them.

And you're out of there. You're gone.

You come back, they're either dead
or gone themselves.

It was a very fractured business.

I remember looking out of that helicopter
as it went away.

January 15, actually.
I didn't go at this battle,

but I went after this. There's Rhah,

giving him his Nietzsche trip.

Bolt of power.

Decided to go quiet here.

Great shot of the chopper,
with dust and light glinting off it.

Slow-mo.

Lot of dust through the chopper blades.

A lot of dead.

There's Samuel Barber.
That sort of sums it up.

Elegy. Good tree.

Wiping the pit.

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 it will always be there
the rest of my days

as I'm sure Elias will be,

fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called
possession of my soul.

There are times since,

I've felt like the child
born of those two fathers.

But, be that as it may,

those of us who did make it

have an obligation to build again,

to teach to others what we know,

and to try with what's left of our lives

to find a goodness and meaning
to this life.

There is no enemy. The enemy is in you.

I hadn't seen this in a while.
I missed it from the '40s movies.

So I wanted to pay a little tribute
to the actors,

because it's hard to remember every name
with so many male faces in the movie.

This was a little special thing for me.

These guys really worked.

They really went through
that basic training in the jungle

and put up with a lot of hard days
and nights.

But they bonded, and they were a platoon.

We shot the whole thing in the Philippines
in about 60 days.

It was...

Having heard all the stories
about what Francis Coppola went through

with Apocalypse Now, we really tried
to get in and out as fast as we could.

So we shot around and we shot hard.

We shot grueling hours

and made it in and out.
We came in on budget.

In the editing, we had no problem.
We cut the couple...

We cut within a few months and everyone
who saw the film immediately reacted to it.

It wasn't like a lot of refinements went on
or changes in the editing.

It was smooth.

And it was just the mood in the country.
There was a great mood to receive

another truth about Vietnam.

It certainly was a long time coming.

1986.

The last men really left in '71, '72 and '73.

I mean, it was 15, 20 years.

And the picture not only
swept the United States,

but it swept the world, which was amazing.

The world picked up on it.

And it was a tremendous,

tremendous,

respect for the veteran,

and it was a long time coming.

ENGLISH - US - COMMENTARY