Do We Get to Win This Time? is a podcast about how Hollywood has depicted and defined the Vietnam War. You can listen on the Big Picture feed. The following is an excerpt from Episode 6: “I Am Reality.”
Dale Dye came of age in the ’50s and early ’60s, right as the studios were making dozens of films about World War II—films like John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima, one of Dye’s favorites. But while he wound up seeing plenty of military films, he didn’t think of them as particularly realistic.
“I think I was smart enough to know better,” Dye says. “And I was certainly smart enough to know that not everything one does in uniform or in the military is going to be great and courageous and so on and so forth. But I was also a fan of any military movie that gave me a little perception or a little look behind the curtain.”
Dye enrolled in military school, and in 1964, he joined the United States Marine Corps. He soon found himself in Vietnam, where he spent most of the late ’60s, returning home with three Purple Hearts.
Over the next several years, Dye traveled the world, reaching the rank of captain before retiring from the Marines in 1984. And he kept going to the movies.
“I think at some point in my life—after about 20 years in uniform—I had seen virtually every military movie there was,” he says. “The vast majority of them sort of pissed me off.”
Dye was frustrated when a movie got the little details wrong: He hated seeing an on-screen soldier wearing the wrong uniform or carrying the wrong gun. But he was even more annoyed by Hollywood’s portrayal of life in the military.
Soon, Dye found himself in Hollywood, looking to start a new career as a technical adviser—someone who could school filmmakers and actors about the realities of being a soldier. He hustled his way around Los Angeles, trying to find a foothold in the movie industry and pitching his idea to anybody who’d listen.
After nearly a year, he was ready to give up. But one day, while reading the industry trades, Dye saw a news item about Oliver Stone’s Vietnam film. After a lot of badgering, Dye managed to land a five-minute meeting with Stone, who was taking a break from editing Salvador.
A few days later, Stone called Dye back and told him he had a plan. He was going to give Dye a bunch of actors to train in the mountains of the Philippines.
In later years, Dye would give military training to actors for such films as Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, and The Thin Red Line. But at the time of Platoon, it was an almost unheard-of idea.
And, not surprisingly, a controversial one.
A few of the actors Stone drafted for Platoon were so opposed to the boot camp that they dropped out of the movie altogether. Those who stayed soon found themselves in the middle of a two-week nightmare, as Dye and a team of fellow veterans subjected them to all manner of torment in the jungle.
The actors learned how to handle and clean real guns. They humped gear for miles. They kept watch at night, at which point the others might ambush them, firing weapons loaded with blanks. Stone himself showed up once at 3 in the morning, setting off explosions around his actors while pretending to be part of a North Vietnamese attack squad.
The activity quickly took its toll on the cast members, who suffered ant bites, mysterious fevers, even machete injuries. And because the actors could consume only prepackaged food in the form of MREs—which stands for “meal, ready to eat”—many of them became constipated for days, shedding pounds along the way.
It wasn’t really war, but it was hellish.
“And it was 24 hours a day, by the way,” Dye says. “They slept two hours, maybe—if they didn’t piss me off that day. And they ate maybe twice—again, [only] if they didn’t piss me off that day.”
In addition to putting the cast members through grueling physical tasks, Dye wanted them to learn to think like a soldier. He led the actors in a daily exercise he called “stand down,” in which they grilled him with questions about military life.
“It could be weird things. ‘How do you take a dump in the field?’ Well, here’s how you do it. ‘What does it feel like to be hit by shrapnel? What does it feel like to be hit by a bullet?’ What I found was that they were assimilating this. They were soaking it up like sponges.”
In a 1986 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Platoon lead Charlie Sheen reflected on how those two weeks affected the cast.
“We didn’t realize when we were going through it at the time how valuable that information was going to be until we got on film, ’cause we didn’t have to think about a lot of the stuff we learned,” Sheen said.
“It just became subconscious. You just reacted, you know?”
