Platoon: How the War Was Won

Actors often grumble about the rigors of filming in remote locations, but few have faced half the hardships inflicted on the cast of Platoon. Fresh from the fleshpots of New York and Los Angeles, the film’s young stars found themselves deep in the Philippine jungle, which stood in nicely for Viet Nam. Clad in sweat-stained fatigues and stooped beneath 60-lb. backpacks and rifles, they marched day and night through leech-infested streams and swarms of insects.

Taunted by a Marine drill instructor who called them “weenies” and some names not fit to print, the actors rappelled down a 50-ft. tower and clambered up an 80-ft. cliff. They were scared witless by special-effects mortar blasts, booby traps and “enemy” ambushes. Dinner was cold Army rations slathered with Tabasco sauce. Sleep meant grubbing a two-man foxhole and dozing in fitful two-hour shifts, interrupted by guard duty and gunfire. And that was only prelude. Filming of Platoon commenced only after two intense weeks of slogging in the bush.

The architect of this unique cinematic boot camp, this military Method acting class, was Captain Dale Dye, 42, a retired Marine Corps lifer who served as the film’s technical adviser. He vowed to “give some of these soft city kids a crash course in jungle fighting.” Tall and ruggedly handsome, with an aura of laconic authority, Dye appears onscreen in Platoon as the captain who calls in an air strike on his own defeated position.

Like Oliver Stone, Dye is a decorated Viet Nam veteran. His was among the first units to splash ashore there in 1965. Over the next decade, he saw buddies die at such hot spots as Hue and Foxtrot Ridge, and he was wounded three times by rockets and mortar fire. “We fought a hell of a war,” he declares, “and until now, Hollywood didn’t give a damn about getting it right.”

Dye created his consultancy, Warriors Inc., in 1985 out of distaste for what he considered the metaphorical rambling of such films as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter and for the revenge fantasies of the Rambo genre. Not only was the drama phony (soldiers surfing through an artillery attack in Apocalypse Now) and the detail wrong (Sylvester Stallone launching rockets with the radio button on a helicopter control stick) but an essential point of view was missing. “The story that needs to come out,” Dye says, “is the human one: what happened to the people who fought the war.”

In Stone, Dye found a kindred spirit who wanted Platoon’s actors to experience the fatigue, frayed nerves and fear that preyed on the Viet Nam infantryman and to understand the casual brutality that often emerged. Willem Dafoe, who plays Sergeant Elias, the platoon’s conscience, recalls that “we certainly did get some taste of exhaustion, frustration and confusion.” Tom Berenger, who plays the soul-dead Sergeant Barnes, agrees. “We didn’t even have to act. We were there.”

Once Dye had the cast thoroughly sore-footed and stinking, Stone began filming, without a break, and continued for nine straight weeks. “They looked mean,” Stone says, “and they stayed that way.” Roaming the sets, Dye ensured the authenticity of every detail, from Barnes’ wicked dagger (“Worn upside-down for quicker killing,” Dye explains) to the proper use of white plastic C-ration spoons. No one said “Over and out” on the field radio, and no one wore camouflage fatigues, which came into use after the period depicted by the film.

During breaks, Dye coached the actors in “gruntspeak,” the expletive- laced jargon of the Viet Nam foot soldier, and he demonstrated an intricate ’60s-era handshake. “I had to keep reminding myself,” he says, “that for the younger guys, the ’60s are ancient history.”

! Dye’s politics, not surprisingly, are fervently anti-Communist: between his retirement from the Marines in 1984 and his move to Hollywood a year later, he edited Soldier of Fortune magazine and unofficially trained Nicaraguan contras. Good-humored political arguments raged between Dye and Stone, who called each other “John Wayne” and “the Bolshevik.” Dye is not concerned that many, including Stone, see Platoon as an antiwar film: “My hope is that it will encourage America not to waste its soldiers’ lives in wars that it is not willing or able to win.” That theme is further explored in one of Dye’s current projects: a screenplay based on his last foreign tour, with the ill- fated U.S. Marine detachment in Beirut.