50 years ago, on April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese People's Army conquered Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the South Vietnamese puppet regime fell, and the 20-year Vietnam War finally came to an end. During the 20-year war, the total death toll on both sides reached millions. In addition to the large number of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers killed and wounded, nearly 60,000 American troops supporting the South Vietnamese regime also died on the battlefield. Oliver Stone, 78 years old this year, also served on the front line of the Vietnam War for one year and three months, and was seriously injured many times. After escaping death, he became the famous director Oliver Stone in the future.
Oliver Stone on the set of "Platoon."
After becoming a director, Oliver Stone has always been obsessed with this special experience and has repeatedly restored it to the screen. In 1986, "Platoon" was released, telling the story of the soul transformation of Taylor, a new soldier played by Charlie Sheen, from passionate to numb on the front line of the Vietnam War. The plot involves sharp issues such as the massacre of civilians and cannibalism by the US military. It won four awards including the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director.
Three years later, in Born on the Fourth of July, Stone successfully adapted the autobiographical novel of veteran Ron Kovic into a film. Starring Tom Cruise, the film tells the story of how a patriotic young man lost his legs and even his entire faith in life because of a brutal war. The film won two Oscars for Best Director and Best Editing.
At the end of 1993, Heaven and Earth, adapted from the autobiography of Vietnamese-American writer Feng Lili, was released as the final chapter of Stone's "Vietnam War Trilogy". Compared with the previous two works, the main perspective of Heaven and Earth was changed to innocent Vietnamese civilians who suffered from the war, but the American sergeant Steve, played by Tommy Lee Jones, also played an important role. Moreover, the ending of this character is the same as the protagonists of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Due to various experiences during and after the war, he eventually went to destruction, which fully reflects Oliver Stone's disgust and criticism of the war as a witness of the Vietnam War.
Half a century later, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, Oliver Stone once again reviewed his experiences on the front line in Vietnam and what happened after returning home, and shared his new views on the present and the future.
[Stone's own words]
I first went to Vietnam in 1965, when I was 18 years old, as a teacher. Three years later, I went to Vietnam again as a soldier. I was young and lacked the conscience that we have now. At that time, everyone believed in that stuff, including me. Suddenly, Vietnam became the center of the world's attention, just like Ukraine now, which made everyone crazy. Everyone was talking about having to fight for Ukraine.
This militaristic mentality was born in America. It's in our blood. I was a relatively conservative young man. Back in 1965, it was fun to be a teacher in Vietnam. It felt like some kind of sacred teaching position. But later I went to other parts of Asia, to Cambodia and Laos. The more I saw, the more disillusioned I became. When I returned to Vietnam as a soldier, it was terrible. There was no beautiful scenery anymore, just barbed wire camps.
Oliver Stone once told his personal version of the Vietnam War in his memoir Chasing the Light.
We had 500,000 people there. As a soldier, I knew it was a mess. It was a botched war from the beginning, and we were counting bodies and pretending we were winning. The whole thing was based on lies, and that wasn't the only lie we had to deal with. I tell my version of the Vietnam War in my book Chasing the Light. When I left in December 1968, I had been wounded twice and had seen a lot of combat. I was shot in the neck and had shrapnel in my body. It was a miracle that I survived the shot in the neck because it was very close to my carotid artery, about six millimeters, but I returned to the battlefield after recovering from that wound.
The main perspective of "Heaven and Earth" is the innocent Vietnamese civilians who have suffered from the war.
I spent most of the 15 months I was in the war in the jungle and the plains around the beach. I was exposed to a lot of things, and God knows if there were any highly toxic substances such as defoliants, because we often walked there during the march. You can see the general situation in my "Vietnam War Trilogy", especially the last one "Heaven and Earth", which shows the beautiful Vietnam, the Vietnam that we have not yet intervened.
I left Vietnam a month before Nixon entered the White House in January 1969. But for Americans, the war continued for another four years, until 1973. Then Nixon finally reached an agreement to bring back the prisoners (the Paris Peace Accords), and most U.S. combat troops left by 1973. The casualties from 1969 to 1973 were staggering.
I returned in 1968. In 1970, I entered the New York University film school. At the time, it was a very revolutionary place, and the students didn't care about veterans or anything, so I kept silent about my experience. In the early 1970s, my views on the war changed, and by the mid-1970s, I was completely on the anti-war side. I became inclined to Jane Fonda's position, and I admired her more and more after the war ended. But when the Vietnam War was still going on, her anti-war stance seemed strange to me for a while.
In March 1968, Lyndon Johnson refused to run, so we knew the war was going to end because he no longer supported his original Vietnam policy. But troops continued to be sent to Vietnam, and the American media continued to "talk about" the Vietnam War - to this day, this is a big problem in our country, and it is always the media that tells us what to think. The New York Times is always terrible in this regard. Every war - Vietnam War, Iraq War - you can go back and read the editorials they wrote at the time. During the Vietnam War, they always stood on the side of the government, always took a tough stance externally, and supported the government internally, and even said that they were the mouthpiece of the government. After the Vietnam War, they changed because they hated Nixon. Now they hate Trump, and they have not let Trump go, but in fact they still support the war, support the war in Ukraine, so it is still as rubbish as before. This war is just another complete lie, but the media continues to deceive the American public, and the public is deceived again.
Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in "Homecoming."
On April 30, 1975, Saigon changed hands, and I felt a sense of relief. Everybody felt that way. In a way, it was a wonderful moment because it was over. Then there was a wave of Vietnam movies, from The Deer Hunter (1978) to Apocalypse Now (1978) to Jane Fonda's Coming Home, all great movies. So I had to do Platoon.
"Platoon" tells the story of a recruit's transformation from passionate to numb soul on the front lines of the Vietnam War.
Then I made Born on the Fourth of July, a very anti-military film. It came out on December 20, 1989, but that was the day the United States invaded Panama. That was the beginning of a change from the end of Vietnam, when we started using the military again and believing in it again. Then came Bush, and we went to Iraq, a war based on media propaganda. According to the media, we were the good side, and the military had done a great thing. But then we went back to Iraq and fought a second Iraq war. It was impossible to stop. As Bush once said, "The ghost of defeat in Vietnam is buried forever in the sands of the Arabian Peninsula."
"Born on the Fourth of July" tells the story of a patriotic young man who lost both legs and even all his faith in life because of the war.
There were concerns that we were becoming too pacifist, too soft, so there was a need to get tough again. And so we did. We got very tough again. And by the end of the 1990s, we had a policy in place—it was written down, and we had done most of it—to go after the seven countries on the neoconservative blacklist. So far, we have hit six of them. The remaining one, of course, is Iran. But if we were to go after Iran, it would be a huge mistake, and we would have forgotten all the Bush nonsense. But I believe we would have gone there, and Netanyahu is our leader, and he is our foreign policy. All of America's Middle East policy would have to go through him. I think this guy is an absolute fanatic, and I interviewed him a few years ago, and I thought he was crazy. He really hates Arabs, and he can't let go of that hatred. So the result is that we are back to the old ways, and we have learned nothing.
I think that our country is really not good at summarizing its own historical lessons.