Latest / Addressing Gettysburg / COMBAT STORIES: Captain Dale Dye

Transcript

COMBAT STORIES: Captain Dale Dye · Addressing Gettysburg

• 1:00:00
  That made my month, Eric.
• 1:00:02
  Thank you for everything.
• 1:00:03
  Sure, man.
• 1:00:03
  That was a lot of fun.
• 1:00:05
  You know, and I'm not kidding when I say
• 1:00:08
  you are a great
• 1:00:09
  interviewer and you do your homework.
• 1:00:13
  I appreciate that.
• 1:00:14
  And no notes, by the way, guys.
• 1:00:16
  No notes.
• 1:00:17
  Believe me, I've done 9,000 of these
• 1:00:19
  things and that was a good one.
• 1:00:21
  Hey, this is Eric Dorr from the
• 1:00:23
  Gettysburg Museum of History.
• 1:00:25
  This interview is pretty amazing to me
• 1:00:29
  also because we've probably heard, or at
• 1:00:33
  least his fans have heard, a lot of
• 1:00:35
  interviews that has to do with his movie
• 1:00:38
  roles and his contributions to film and
• 1:00:42
  the series Band of Brothers and Saving
• 1:00:45
  Private Ryan and Platoon.
• 1:00:47
  But this particular
• 1:00:48
  interview is really amazing.
• 1:00:50
  He talks about his military service and
• 1:00:53
  there's not a whole
• 1:00:53
  lot of that out there.
• 1:00:55
  And I learned several things that I
• 1:00:58
  didn't know about him.
• 1:00:59
  It was absolutely an
• 1:01:02
  incredible interview.
• 1:01:04
  But I wanted to let you know that he also
• 1:01:07
  has come on board with the Gettysburg
• 1:01:10
  Museum of History in the
• 1:01:12
  capacity of our board of directors.
• 1:01:14
  So he's going to be assisting us as we
• 1:01:16
  develop the new exhibits
• 1:01:17
  over at the new building.
• 1:01:20
  And we're going to build a world-class,
• 1:01:22
  easy company, Band of Brothers exhibit.
• 1:01:25
  And I can't think of anyone better to
• 1:01:28
  direct us in this
• 1:01:29
  endeavor than Captain Dale Dye.
• 1:01:31
  So we give you Captain Dale Dye.
• 1:02:14
  I gotta tell you, I admire your gumption
• 1:02:16
  just going out to Hollywood and figuring
• 1:02:18
  out a way to make that work.
• 1:02:21
  Because my friends and I, when Private
• 1:02:26
  Ryan came out, we were,
• 1:02:28
  what year was that, 97?
• 1:02:30
  Yeah, 97, yeah.
• 1:02:33
  We were 19, I think.
• 1:02:35
  Yeah, 19.
• 1:02:36
  And we saw, you know, the previous four,
• 1:02:39
  and we were like, "Oh yeah, let's go see
• 1:02:40
  a one more two movie, we're
• 1:02:41
  all about it and everything."
• 1:02:43
  And when we, when it was over, we went to
• 1:02:48
  a diner to get coffee,
• 1:02:50
  and four of us were there.
• 1:02:52
  And two of them were these big jock
• 1:02:54
  types, you know, the real tough guys.
• 1:02:55
  Sure.
• 1:02:56
  No one could speak for half an hour
• 1:02:58
  because they were ready to cry.
• 1:03:00
  And I remember that was the first, I
• 1:03:05
  don't know if it was the first movie I
• 1:03:06
  saw with Surround Sound, but it was the
• 1:03:09
  first one I saw that
• 1:03:09
  really made good use of it.
• 1:03:11
  Yeah.
• 1:03:12
  And the sound of a bullet whizzing past
• 1:03:15
  my ear and hitting a piece of metal or
• 1:03:19
  dirt or someone's head,
• 1:03:22
  and that cold, just it means business and
• 1:03:26
  it does what it does sound.
• 1:03:27
  Yeah.
• 1:03:28
  I sort of got, I can't watch that movie
• 1:03:30
  but once a year, if that,
• 1:03:33
  because it's so realistic.
• 1:03:35
  You have to credit
• 1:03:36
  Steven Spielberg for that.
• 1:03:37
  He's a huge believer in sound.
• 1:03:40
  Yeah.
• 1:03:41
  And I remember when we were through with
• 1:03:43
  the film, we shot the initial sequence in
• 1:03:47
  a beach called CuraClo
• 1:03:49
  in southwest Ireland.
• 1:03:52
  And he called me when we got home, he
• 1:03:56
  said, you know, "Thank you very much for
• 1:03:58
  everything, but I still need you."
• 1:04:00
  And I said, "Well, what's up?"
• 1:04:01
  And he said, "We're really
• 1:04:02
  going to juice the sound."
• 1:04:04
  And I said, "That's good news.
• 1:04:06
  Now what?"
• 1:04:07
  Yeah.
• 1:04:07
  And what we did was we went to a range up
• 1:04:10
  in the Bay Area and we
• 1:04:13
  arranged microphones down...
• 1:04:16
  Down range.
• 1:04:16
  Down range.
• 1:04:17
  And then I locked up a machine gun so
• 1:04:21
  that the mics would pick up the Doppler
• 1:04:24
  effect up around, calling by, you know,
• 1:04:26
  when you hear it close.
• 1:04:27
  Yes. You know when it's close.
• 1:04:28
  Right.
• 1:04:30
  And then I went out and bought a side of
• 1:04:33
  beef and we hung up a side of beef on the
• 1:04:36
  range and we used a
• 1:04:38
  suppressed MP5 with subsonic ammo.
• 1:04:43
  And I fired into that beef and we'd hit
• 1:04:47
  the meat and then we hit the bone and he
• 1:04:50
  got...it was miked in there.
• 1:04:51
  Yeah.
• 1:04:52
  So he got all the sound.
• 1:04:53
  And then we put up some angle iron and I
• 1:04:56
  fired at that and he
• 1:04:57
  got the ricochet effect.
• 1:04:58
  Yeah.
• 1:04:59
  I knew it was going to be
• 1:05:00
  wonderful when he cut it in.
• 1:05:03
  And then obviously it was used again in
• 1:05:05
  Band of Brothers and
• 1:05:06
  everybody's copied it since then.
• 1:05:08
  And
• 1:05:08
  it's...I'm
• 1:05:10
  it's...I'm it's...I'm it's...I'm it's...I'm it's...I'm And I took it down to get the sound of
• 1:05:35
  Civil War artillery rounds because we
• 1:05:37
  were live firing artillery.
• 1:05:39
  And that was really cool.
• 1:05:42
  But again it was chilling because it just
• 1:05:45
  comes in and it thwaps against whatever
• 1:05:48
  it hits and it doesn't
• 1:05:50
  care what's in the way.
• 1:05:51
  It just goes through whatever.
• 1:05:52
  And you know
• 1:05:53
  it...I've
• 1:06:02
  And it always upsets me because I've
• 1:06:04
  fired a lot of flintlock weapons.
• 1:06:05
  And you hear the snap before you hear
• 1:06:07
  they went in on the frisson.
• 1:06:08
  The frisson ignites
• 1:06:10
  and there it goes around.
• 1:06:11
  But you never hear that.
• 1:06:12
  You know the sound guys don't get it.
• 1:06:14
  I think...didn't the Patriot get that?
• 1:06:18
  I don't know.
• 1:06:18
  I can't remember.
• 1:06:19
  I feel like one of them is
• 1:06:21
  the first time I noticed that.
• 1:06:23
  Where you hear it.
• 1:06:24
  Snap bang.
• 1:06:25
  But you're right.
• 1:06:28
  Civil War and Revolutionary War.
• 1:06:29
  Well any black powder movies drive me
• 1:06:32
  nuts with the sound.
• 1:06:33
  Master and Commander was good.
• 1:06:35
  Because they did what you guys did.
• 1:06:37
  And they took period
• 1:06:38
  cannon out to a range.
• 1:06:40
  They set up a foe side of a ship.
• 1:06:44
  A hull of a ship.
• 1:06:45
  And shot into it.
• 1:06:46
  Get the wood.
• 1:06:48
  I love that.
• 1:06:50
  But I don't know.
• 1:06:51
  I just love that.
• 1:06:52
  To me the visual can be whatever.
• 1:06:56
  But you get that sound right.
• 1:06:57
  And that's what gets me to the core.
• 1:07:00
  It creates...fires the imagination.
• 1:07:03
  And you can see things that aren't really
• 1:07:05
  there but the sound is
• 1:07:07
  telling you what to do.
• 1:07:08
  Right.
• 1:07:08
  Right.
• 1:07:08
  Yeah.
• 1:07:09
  No.
• 1:07:09
  It's really good stuff.
• 1:07:11
  It's so innovative and it's...
• 1:07:15
  I just noticed from that
• 1:07:17
  moment on when Ryan came out.
• 1:07:19
  Every war movie tried to be it.
• 1:07:21
  Some came close but not too many.
• 1:07:24
  The brilliant sound thing.
• 1:07:26
  And I didn't realize it.
• 1:07:27
  Spielberg told me he was going to do it.
• 1:07:30
  And I got to thinking about it.
• 1:07:31
  And what it is essentially is how when
• 1:07:34
  Tom's character Captain Miller submerges.
• 1:07:38
  Dead silence.
• 1:07:39
  Because he's under war.
• 1:07:39
  And when he reemerges he
• 1:07:42
  whacked with that sound again.
• 1:07:44
  That was brilliant.
• 1:07:44
  It was brilliant.
• 1:07:45
  And it's not only
• 1:07:46
  just the sounds back on.
• 1:07:47
  It's like a whoosh as
• 1:07:49
  the water clears your ear.
• 1:07:51
  Oh it's so good.
• 1:07:53
  He's the best.
• 1:07:54
  You can't beat him.
• 1:07:56
  He's fantastic.
• 1:07:58
  Yeah I've enjoyed watching interviews
• 1:08:00
  with you for the last day and a half.
• 1:08:02
  Because I've always...
• 1:08:07
  When I...
• 1:08:08
  Again it had to be Ryan.
• 1:08:10
  When I saw like a
• 1:08:11
  behind the scenes thing.
• 1:08:12
  That's the first time I'd heard of you.
• 1:08:14
  And I thought the actor
• 1:08:16
  boot camp was the coolest idea.
• 1:08:18
  And I was like that's
• 1:08:19
  why this movie is so good.
• 1:08:20
  Because these guys went through it.
• 1:08:23
  Sort of.
• 1:08:23
  You know.
• 1:08:24
  They went through
• 1:08:24
  something where they have an idea.
• 1:08:26
  And a good actor can fill in the rest.
• 1:08:29
  Right.
• 1:08:30
  But I just...
• 1:08:32
  That's such a brilliant idea
• 1:08:33
  that you went and did that.
• 1:08:34
  Thank God you did that.
• 1:08:35
  I really think because you
• 1:08:37
  de-romanticize war for me.
• 1:08:40
  And I'm so glad of that because...
• 1:08:42
  The guy was asking me the other day.
• 1:08:46
  He said look.
• 1:08:48
  If you died tomorrow
• 1:08:49
  what would your legacy be?
• 1:08:51
  What would your...
• 1:08:52
  I said look.
• 1:08:53
  As far as I'm concerned the epitaph that
• 1:08:56
  would be most rewarding to me.
• 1:08:57
  Is simply he changed the way
• 1:09:00
  Hollywood makes war movies.
• 1:09:01
  And if I did that then good on me.
• 1:09:04
  I agree.
• 1:09:07
  Honestly the way I look
• 1:09:08
  at it is unfortunately.
• 1:09:10
  Good or bad.
• 1:09:11
  Whatever.
• 1:09:12
  Most people get their
• 1:09:12
  history from movies.
• 1:09:14
  Yeah.
• 1:09:14
  Yeah they do.
• 1:09:15
  Or at least the spark
• 1:09:17
  is lit from a movie.
• 1:09:20
  And a war movie.
• 1:09:25
  I get why they did it
• 1:09:26
  in the 40s and the 50s.
• 1:09:27
  During the cold war and
• 1:09:28
  World War II and all that stuff.
• 1:09:29
  I get why they did the hurrah stuff.
• 1:09:33
  And all of that for political purposes or
• 1:09:36
  propaganda purposes.
• 1:09:37
  But I'm glad that hippie
• 1:09:42
  generation got into realism.
• 1:09:44
  Because I think war is one thing that is
• 1:09:48
  just so heartbreaking and horrendous.
• 1:09:50
  And I don't care what anybody tells me.
• 1:09:54
  But maybe I care what you
• 1:09:56
  tell me if I'm wrong here.
• 1:09:57
  But my theory is putting
• 1:10:01
  myself in a soldier's shoes.
• 1:10:04
  Is the first time.
• 1:10:06
  Either the first time a
• 1:10:09
  bullet is fired at him in anger.
• 1:10:11
  Or he sees his body die.
• 1:10:15
  Or he takes a life.
• 1:10:17
  He dies.
• 1:10:18
  A part of him dies.
• 1:10:19
  He's not that kid who went into basic.
• 1:10:22
  And he'll never be that person again.
• 1:10:24
  That's right.
• 1:10:24
  No matter how well he
• 1:10:25
  does in civilian life.
• 1:10:27
  I mean I remember my grandfather.
• 1:10:28
  He was in World War II.
• 1:10:29
  And he told me that he came home.
• 1:10:32
  The war was over.
• 1:10:35
  And he spent the first
• 1:10:36
  seven days locked in his room.
• 1:10:38
  And he would only come down for dinner.
• 1:10:40
  Didn't even shower.
• 1:10:41
  Just stayed locked in his room.
• 1:10:44
  And his sister and mother
• 1:10:46
  were like Jackie come on.
• 1:10:47
  Come out with us.
• 1:10:48
  Everything.
• 1:10:48
  He's just no no no.
• 1:10:50
  And in that I said well
• 1:10:51
  what'd you do for seven days.
• 1:10:53
  And he goes.
• 1:10:55
  I thought what the hell
• 1:10:56
  did I just go through.
• 1:10:57
  And he goes because you're not thinking
• 1:10:58
  about it when you're in it.
• 1:10:59
  You just got to.
• 1:11:00
  It's do or die.
• 1:11:00
  You got to do it.
• 1:11:02
  But when I finally was back home.
• 1:11:06
  I didn't feel like I was home.
• 1:11:08
  I didn't feel like I was me.
• 1:11:10
  I didn't feel anything.
• 1:11:11
  And I was just like what the
• 1:11:12
  hell did I just go through.
• 1:11:14
  And then finally by day seven he said.
• 1:11:17
  I go well.
• 1:11:19
  Whatever I went through.
• 1:11:21
  I went through it.
• 1:11:21
  It's in the past.
• 1:11:23
  I am 30 years old.
• 1:11:24
  I have a whole life ahead of me.
• 1:11:26
  Let's make it happen.
• 1:11:28
  And he did.
• 1:11:28
  But there's other guys who came back and
• 1:11:30
  they lost themselves in the bottom of a
• 1:11:31
  bottle or whatever the case may be.
• 1:11:33
  And they never were able to.
• 1:11:35
  Yeah it's it's a.
• 1:11:37
  You know in my own case there was about
• 1:11:38
  10 years after my war when you and I
• 1:11:41
  wouldn't be talking.
• 1:11:43
  I had no time for any
• 1:11:44
  scum sucking civilian.
• 1:11:46
  I mean I just I was angry.
• 1:11:48
  Yeah.
• 1:11:48
  Because nobody got it.
• 1:11:50
  Nobody but another veteran.
• 1:11:51
  And so I just isolated
• 1:11:53
  myself on base and stayed there.
• 1:11:55
  Yeah. 10 years I went through that.
• 1:11:57
  So you were in Vietnam.
• 1:12:00
  How many tours did you have in Vietnam.
• 1:12:01
  Three tours.
• 1:12:02
  One Purple Heart tour.
• 1:12:03
  Per tour.
• 1:12:05
  Right.
• 1:12:05
  But three.
• 1:12:06
  But it was it was no tour.
• 1:12:07
  No 68 was a really bad year.
• 1:12:09
  There were two in that year.
• 1:12:11
  And the last one in in early 70.
• 1:12:16
  So the first one you.
• 1:12:19
  Well how bad were they.
• 1:12:21
  Were they bad enough.
• 1:12:22
  You got a Purple Heart.
• 1:12:24
  Yeah.
• 1:12:25
  And you went back.
• 1:12:26
  So here's here's the explanation.
• 1:12:30
  I've thought about this for 50 years.
• 1:12:33
  You know what.
• 1:12:33
  Why in the hell did I keep going back
• 1:12:35
  when I didn't have to.
• 1:12:37
  And when everybody else was scrambling
• 1:12:39
  not to do a repeat performance.
• 1:12:41
  And it occurred to me that the real
• 1:12:43
  reason there are two real reasons.
• 1:12:46
  The first one was because in retrospect I
• 1:12:52
  considered myself a pro.
• 1:12:54
  OK.
• 1:12:55
  I'm a professional.
• 1:12:56
  OK.
• 1:12:57
  And you know professionals got to play.
• 1:12:59
  They want to play.
• 1:13:00
  I don't want to be on a bench.
• 1:13:01
  I want to be in the game.
• 1:13:03
  Yeah.
• 1:13:03
  Yeah.
• 1:13:03
  I get it.
• 1:13:04
  So so that affected me.
• 1:13:06
  And along with that came
• 1:13:07
  a certain feeling that.
• 1:13:10
  If I went and use my experience maybe I
• 1:13:14
  could keep some people alive who
• 1:13:15
  otherwise wouldn't have been.
• 1:13:17
  So that occurred to me.
• 1:13:20
  And the other thing and here's here's one
• 1:13:22
  that will probably surprise you.
• 1:13:25
  I came to realize that.
• 1:13:28
  I liked it.
• 1:13:30
  OK.
• 1:13:31
  I enjoyed it.
• 1:13:31
  All right.
• 1:13:32
  That business of living out on the
• 1:13:34
  razor's edge adrenaline charge razor's
• 1:13:36
  edge made everything
• 1:13:37
  else pale by comparison.
• 1:13:39
  I can imagine that. Yeah. And so it was a matter of trying to beat
• 1:13:45
  the odds the decreasing
• 1:13:46
  odds of staying alive.
• 1:13:48
  It was it was it jacked me right up.
• 1:13:51
  I was I was ready to do this.
• 1:13:53
  No I can understand that.
• 1:13:55
  Yeah.
• 1:13:56
  It's like why people go
• 1:13:57
  skydiving or bungee jumping.
• 1:13:59
  It's that risking life.
• 1:14:01
  Except yours was
• 1:14:02
  actually risking your life.
• 1:14:02
  And you know there are moments because I
• 1:14:07
  began to think about this.
• 1:14:09
  I mean I'm not prone to a lot of fuzzy
• 1:14:10
  headed navel gazing but but I am
• 1:14:13
  introspective when it comes to the war
• 1:14:15
  experience and I because I have to be.
• 1:14:18
  I'm in the business of communicating with
• 1:14:19
  people what the
• 1:14:20
  combat experience is like.
• 1:14:21
  Right.
• 1:14:25
  And there's a unique.
• 1:14:27
  There's a unique experience I guess.
• 1:14:31
  And I call it the come to Jesus moment.
• 1:14:33
  OK.
• 1:14:35
  And I remember when it happened.
• 1:14:38
  What happens is you get
• 1:14:40
  into a close combat situation.
• 1:14:42
  And a lot of times you're just you know
• 1:14:44
  you're firing at shadows in the bush or
• 1:14:47
  you see muzzle flash
• 1:14:48
  and you shoot at that.
• 1:14:50
  And then you get into fights like way
• 1:14:53
  what was Ted of 68
• 1:14:54
  where it was close combat.
• 1:14:56
  I mean you were looking in his BDS
• 1:14:58
  eyeballs and you were looking and he was
• 1:14:59
  looking in your right.
• 1:15:02
  And that was the first time I'd ever seen
• 1:15:04
  a guy that I killed that
• 1:15:06
  I shot believe him apart.
• 1:15:09
  And what happened that evening.
• 1:15:13
  I was laying on in some rubble building
• 1:15:17
  and looking up at the moon.
• 1:15:20
  And I said oh my God I
• 1:15:24
  think I have just doomed myself.
• 1:15:27
  I think my soul is gone.
• 1:15:30
  And I was brought up you know as a
• 1:15:31
  Christian kid and went to
• 1:15:33
  church and all that sort of thing.
• 1:15:35
  You know the big big commandment is thou
• 1:15:38
  shalt not kill and I just did.
• 1:15:40
  Yeah.
• 1:15:41
  And I saw the result of it.
• 1:15:42
  No question that I blew that guy away.
• 1:15:46
  And you sit there and say oh Jesus.
• 1:15:49
  I'm not going to deal with this.
• 1:15:51
  You know you really
• 1:15:51
  reach a crisis of conscience.
• 1:15:53
  Yeah.
• 1:15:55
  And it took me I didn't say much about it
• 1:15:58
  because it sort of embarrassed me.
• 1:16:01
  But as I went along and talked to more
• 1:16:04
  people and became really intimate friends
• 1:16:07
  with people they would tell me this.
• 1:16:08
  Yeah I had the same thing.
• 1:16:09
  I get it.
• 1:16:10
  Yeah.
• 1:16:11
  And that experience is something that
• 1:16:13
  I've often tried to get on film and I'm
• 1:16:16
  not I've failed so far because it's so
• 1:16:19
  it's so internal it's so visceral that
• 1:16:23
  it's very hard to take a picture of it.
• 1:16:25
  You know you'd have to show the guy
• 1:16:26
  breaking down or something.
• 1:16:28
  Yeah.
• 1:16:28
  Yeah you can't.
• 1:16:30
  Because when you do the breakdowns the
• 1:16:33
  combat fatigue sequence everybody says
• 1:16:37
  well of course you know he's been through
• 1:16:38
  a lot of dangerous things and he's very
• 1:16:41
  tired and he's
• 1:16:41
  exhausted so he falls over.
• 1:16:45
  In many cases it's because he's suffering
• 1:16:47
  that crisis of conscience.
• 1:16:49
  Yeah.
• 1:16:50
  And and that's something that is kind of
• 1:16:53
  unique to the combat experience.
• 1:16:55
  The only other people I've talked to who
• 1:16:59
  who sort of had to deal with it were
• 1:17:00
  police officers law enforcement.
• 1:17:02
  Sure. Yeah.
• 1:17:02
  They've shot somebody in a line of duty
• 1:17:05
  and the guy died and there you are
• 1:17:07
  sitting and you know looking at your
• 1:17:08
  handiwork if you will.
• 1:17:10
  Right.
• 1:17:11
  And so I've talked to policemen who tell
• 1:17:13
  me they've they've had
• 1:17:14
  that come to Jesus experience.
• 1:17:16
  I actually once in a while I'll go down a
• 1:17:19
  rabbit hole on YouTube and
• 1:17:20
  I'll watch cop body cam videos.
• 1:17:25
  And I have seen a number of them where
• 1:17:26
  they have had to shoot somebody and they
• 1:17:28
  immediately break down and start crying
• 1:17:30
  and their buddies have to try to buck
• 1:17:32
  them up and make sure they're okay.
• 1:17:34
  But what I always found to be the
• 1:17:36
  strangest is that you know law
• 1:17:38
  enforcement is different the military.
• 1:17:39
  Yeah.
• 1:17:40
  But when they when they shoot somebody
• 1:17:41
  the first thing they
• 1:17:42
  have to do is render eight.
• 1:17:43
  Yeah.
• 1:17:44
  Which.
• 1:17:45
  Yeah.
• 1:17:45
  And it's funny that's the difference
• 1:17:46
  really between the combat experience and
• 1:17:50
  the law enforcement experience.
• 1:17:52
  That's usually a one time shootout.
• 1:17:54
  It's one guy against another guy down he
• 1:17:55
  goes and now you have
• 1:17:57
  time to deal with it.
• 1:17:59
  You know to render aid or to or to break
• 1:18:01
  down and all that sort of thing.
• 1:18:03
  In combat you can't do that.
• 1:18:04
  No. No.
• 1:18:05
  You can't stop.
• 1:18:06
  You've got to keep going.
• 1:18:07
  His buddies will shoot you.
• 1:18:08
  And I've talked to guys who tell me that
• 1:18:10
  they had to come to Jesus moment but it
• 1:18:12
  was weeks later when you know their mind
• 1:18:15
  got around to review it.
• 1:18:16
  Right.
• 1:18:17
  Right.
• 1:18:17
  So there there's a little
• 1:18:18
  bit of difference there.
• 1:18:19
  So when you when you have that moment
• 1:18:20
  where you've taken your first life that
• 1:18:22
  you know you've taken.
• 1:18:23
  Yeah.
• 1:18:26
  Is is at some point the thought.
• 1:18:30
  Well there's no turning back now.
• 1:18:32
  I might as well keep going.
• 1:18:33
  But you know what I'm
• 1:18:34
  saying when I said yeah I do.
• 1:18:36
  And I guess there is some of that.
• 1:18:38
  Because you're concerned
• 1:18:41
  with survival beyond this.
• 1:18:43
  You know this is one thing
• 1:18:44
  and you've got to deal with it.
• 1:18:45
  Right. But you have to push on.
• 1:18:47
  You have to get on.
• 1:18:48
  And I think your training takes over if
• 1:18:52
  you're well trained.
• 1:18:53
  What happens is okay.
• 1:18:55
  I've done this.
• 1:18:56
  I'm either doomed or I'm not.
• 1:18:58
  But I can't stop and contemplate it.
• 1:19:00
  I've got to get on and
• 1:19:01
  that really saves you.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah.
• 1:19:04
  So let's go.
• 1:19:04
  Let's go back to the beginning.
• 1:19:06
  Not the very beginning but the beginning
• 1:19:07
  of your military career.
• 1:19:10
  I think what were you
• 1:19:10
  19 when you went in.
• 1:19:12
  Yeah.
• 1:19:12
  No I was 18.
• 1:19:13
  18. Yeah. Okay.
• 1:19:14
  So many you were able to you signed up.
• 1:19:17
  Yeah.
• 1:19:18
  Originally I had I
• 1:19:19
  went to a military school.
• 1:19:21
  I was a military academy in Mexico
• 1:19:23
  Missouri and I was I was bound to
• 1:19:25
  determine to make my military career.
• 1:19:27
  Even at a very young age.
• 1:19:29
  I thought that's what I want to do.
• 1:19:31
  But I chased too many girls and you know
• 1:19:36
  played too much sports.
• 1:19:37
  And yeah. So when I came to take the I want to go
• 1:19:40
  to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
• 1:19:43
  And when it came to taking the exams I
• 1:19:45
  went swirling toward the toilet.
• 1:19:48
  I mean I was couldn't handle the
• 1:19:49
  engineering and the
• 1:19:50
  math and all that stuff.
• 1:19:52
  Yeah.
• 1:19:52
  So I took these gammon
• 1:19:54
  failed it not only once but twice.
• 1:19:57
  And I had that you know oh my God what am
• 1:20:01
  I there's no money for college.
• 1:20:03
  You couldn't get loans or
• 1:20:04
  scholarships like you can now.
• 1:20:06
  And so what am I going to do.
• 1:20:08
  You know what's
• 1:20:08
  what's my life to be here.
• 1:20:11
  Am I going to be a farmer.
• 1:20:12
  Am I going to you know am I going to work
• 1:20:13
  in the AP green fire brick
• 1:20:15
  plant for the rest of my life.
• 1:20:16
  Most of my buddies did.
• 1:20:18
  Right.
• 1:20:20
  And I said it just isn't right.
• 1:20:22
  I can't accept this.
• 1:20:24
  And one winter evening right right either
• 1:20:27
  before right after Christmas in 1963.
• 1:20:32
  I was crying the poor ass sitting on a
• 1:20:37
  curb in Cape Girardeau Missouri.
• 1:20:40
  And I happened to be at the time right
• 1:20:43
  outside of the post office.
• 1:20:44
  You know just it was sleeting and raining
• 1:20:48
  and I was wet and I was cold and I was
• 1:20:50
  miserable and I said you
• 1:20:51
  know my life is over at 18.
• 1:20:54
  Yeah.
• 1:20:54
  And I looked around and here was this A
• 1:20:58
  sign right outside the post office and it
• 1:21:02
  had this picture of this lantern jawed
• 1:21:06
  rugged looking marine
• 1:21:07
  and dress blue uniform.
• 1:21:08
  And it just said one
• 1:21:10
  word right over the top.
• 1:21:11
  It said ready.
• 1:21:12
  And I said you know by God I think I am.
• 1:21:15
  And the next day I enlisted.
• 1:21:17
  So when you're at that but before you're
• 1:21:20
  at that point as you're growing up you're
• 1:21:21
  watching John Wayne movies you're
• 1:21:23
  watching all types of
• 1:21:24
  war movies are sure right.
• 1:21:25
  And it's and it just draws you in.
• 1:21:28
  What was it about those.
• 1:21:31
  And I know this is this is kind of like I
• 1:21:34
  said this is in a lot of your interviews
• 1:21:36
  but I want to at least establish this.
• 1:21:37
  So what is it about
• 1:21:39
  those movies that got you.
• 1:21:43
  And then tell me about
• 1:21:44
  what happened once you got in.
• 1:21:47
  Look I think I think what happened as I
• 1:21:52
  recall it and it's you know at my age I'm
• 1:21:54
  80 now it's hard to
• 1:21:55
  remember those things.
• 1:21:58
  As I recall it my father
• 1:22:01
  used to be a liquor salesman.
• 1:22:03
  My most to any other store.
• 1:22:05
  Best job he could never keep.
• 1:22:09
  And because he drank most of
• 1:22:11
  what he was supposed to sell.
• 1:22:12
  But he would take me around to the bars
• 1:22:14
  with him when he was
• 1:22:15
  making his deliveries.
• 1:22:17
  And I would sit and
• 1:22:18
  listen to these old veterans.
• 1:22:20
  Guys who'd been on Iwo Jima and who'd
• 1:22:22
  been at Normandy and and I just you know.
• 1:22:26
  In all of them I would sit and look and
• 1:22:28
  listen to those stories and I think
• 1:22:30
  that's what lit the spark.
• 1:22:33
  I suddenly began to I had this vivid
• 1:22:35
  imagination as a kid and I still do.
• 1:22:38
  And what happened was I began to see
• 1:22:40
  myself in that flag waving scene you know
• 1:22:44
  from Mount Suribachi and Iwo Jima.
• 1:22:47
  And then I began to consume John Wayne in
• 1:22:50
  the movies and all that sort of thing.
• 1:22:52
  So what's your favorite John Wayne movie.
• 1:22:54
  Favorite favorite John Wayne movie.
• 1:22:58
  Well I really like
• 1:22:59
  Stagecoach one of his first one.
• 1:23:02
  And a number of them I
• 1:23:03
  hate the Green Berets.
• 1:23:06
  Yeah I didn't like that.
• 1:23:07
  It's a horrible piece of work.
• 1:23:09
  A little bovine excrement there.
• 1:23:12
  Was it was the sands of Iwo Jima one of
• 1:23:15
  the movies that got you wanting to do it.
• 1:23:17
  Sorry it's a striker.
• 1:23:18
  Yeah I mean anybody who's ever worn the
• 1:23:20
  marine uniform knows
• 1:23:21
  that movie inside and out.
• 1:23:23
  Right.
• 1:23:23
  Right.
• 1:23:24
  Right.
• 1:23:25
  And it's very easy once you think of
• 1:23:29
  yourself as either wanting
• 1:23:31
  to be a marine or being one.
• 1:23:33
  Very easy to put yourself in
• 1:23:34
  the sergeant striker position.
• 1:23:36
  Yeah.
• 1:23:36
  And I did.
• 1:23:37
  I certainly did.
• 1:23:39
  OK so I derailed you there.
• 1:23:40
  I'm sorry.
• 1:23:41
  So you were saying you were before the
• 1:23:43
  movies and you were listening to these
• 1:23:45
  veterans talking and you were and you saw
• 1:23:47
  yourself in the Iwo Jima.
• 1:23:48
  Yeah.
• 1:23:49
  Yeah.
• 1:23:49
  And I think there was just a spark in me
• 1:23:53
  and it fired my imagination.
• 1:23:57
  You know the flint hit the fritzing pan
• 1:23:59
  and suddenly I saw myself in all these
• 1:24:01
  situations and I wanted to be that guy.
• 1:24:03
  Or I wanted part of that.
• 1:24:05
  What was it about that though.
• 1:24:07
  I guess it seemed to
• 1:24:09
  me that it was purpose.
• 1:24:11
  OK.
• 1:24:12
  Working in a fire brick plant or you know
• 1:24:16
  change the truck tires down at the local.
• 1:24:19
  There never seemed to
• 1:24:21
  be any purpose to that.
• 1:24:22
  Sure.
• 1:24:23
  Everybody else thought it was great.
• 1:24:24
  You know I'll get married and have a
• 1:24:25
  couple of kids and I'll work a couple of
• 1:24:27
  shifts at the fire
• 1:24:27
  brick plant and I'm good.
• 1:24:30
  Not me.
• 1:24:31
  There was something on the other side of
• 1:24:32
  that hill and I wanted to
• 1:24:33
  see what the hell it was.
• 1:24:35
  Yeah.
• 1:24:35
  And it was insatiable.
• 1:24:36
  It was a drive. I just knew that I could not sit there in
• 1:24:41
  Southeast Missouri and be happy unless I
• 1:24:44
  had seen everything there was to see.
• 1:24:48
  And so I embarked on it and I told myself
• 1:24:50
  look some way I'm going to
• 1:24:53
  see what this is all about.
• 1:24:54
  I'm going to see what the throbbing heart
• 1:24:56
  of this experience is
• 1:24:58
  not just superficially.
• 1:24:59
  I want to know what it means viscerally.
• 1:25:02
  Get down in the gut.
• 1:25:04
  And that's what I pursued.
• 1:25:05
  You're like an artist.
• 1:25:07
  I guess.
• 1:25:09
  Yeah.
• 1:25:09
  I mean.
• 1:25:10
  Interesting analogy but.
• 1:25:11
  Well no because you want an artist wants
• 1:25:14
  to know everything about life.
• 1:25:17
  Yeah.
• 1:25:17
  Right.
• 1:25:18
  They want to know
• 1:25:18
  what makes people people.
• 1:25:20
  You know if I'm writing a
• 1:25:21
  novel I need to understand people.
• 1:25:23
  Yeah.
• 1:25:24
  Right.
• 1:25:24
  Otherwise all my characters the same.
• 1:25:25
  So you're you are kind of like an artist.
• 1:25:30
  You just you just chose to experience
• 1:25:33
  these things and
• 1:25:36
  later turned it into art.
• 1:25:37
  I mean you you are an artist.
• 1:25:39
  You know you might not
• 1:25:40
  think of yourself that way.
• 1:25:41
  You know that's a compliment.
• 1:25:43
  Thank you.
• 1:25:43
  You're welcome.
• 1:25:45
  I think I've always had
• 1:25:47
  this vivid imagination.
• 1:25:49
  You know I think I hit 12
• 1:25:51
  years old and stop drawing.
• 1:25:52
  It was just it.
• 1:25:54
  And my imagination would take me places.
• 1:25:58
  And like an artist day.
• 1:26:00
  Yeah.
• 1:26:00
  Yeah.
• 1:26:00
  I mean I write books I make movies and
• 1:26:04
  all of that is painting a picture and I'm
• 1:26:07
  somewhere in that picture.
• 1:26:09
  And that's I almost
• 1:26:11
  can't do without that.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah.
• 1:26:13
  I mean it just is a drive in my life.
• 1:26:15
  Yeah. OK.
• 1:26:19
  So when you get in what was the first
• 1:26:23
  moment where you realized John Wayne's
• 1:26:29
  movies are bullshit.
• 1:26:31
  What was the first thing
• 1:26:32
  that kind of said to you.
• 1:26:33
  Oh man this is completely different. Well look I think anybody will tell you
• 1:26:38
  the boot camp experience of the Marine
• 1:26:40
  Corps is an eye opener.
• 1:26:42
  Yeah.
• 1:26:43
  And especially in those days because it
• 1:26:45
  was brutally physical.
• 1:26:47
  Yeah.
• 1:26:47
  They're not allowed to do that stuff
• 1:26:49
  today but they were then.
• 1:26:51
  And you you begin to.
• 1:26:53
  It's a challenge to that that that
• 1:26:55
  insatiable artistic urge that you have.
• 1:26:59
  Say wait a minute.
• 1:26:59
  Is this is it worth this.
• 1:27:01
  Can I do without it. And it's not worth it. Can I do without it.
• 1:27:03
  And the answer is you can't.
• 1:27:05
  But I didn't have it bad in boot camp
• 1:27:06
  because of my military school experiences
• 1:27:08
  I knew the drill and
• 1:27:09
  all that sort of thing.
• 1:27:10
  So I very quickly became you know a
• 1:27:13
  leader a private
• 1:27:14
  leader in one of the things.
• 1:27:16
  So it wasn't it wasn't a
• 1:27:18
  horrible experience for me.
• 1:27:21
  And initially I was assigned as an 81
• 1:27:24
  millimeter Morterman.
• 1:27:25
  Frankly oddly enough
• 1:27:29
  because I understood geometry.
• 1:27:32
  Okay.
• 1:27:32
  And trigonometry and that's essentially
• 1:27:33
  the fire control solution for mortars or
• 1:27:37
  indirect fire weapon.
• 1:27:38
  You mean you inherently understood it or
• 1:27:39
  you did well at any school.
• 1:27:41
  The trig and geometry told me the
• 1:27:43
  solution and I could see it.
• 1:27:45
  Okay.
• 1:27:45
  Yeah. And so everybody said oh this kid this kid's going to be a Morterman. And I did that for a couple of years.
• 1:27:53
  But once again it
• 1:27:55
  wasn't scratching my urge.
• 1:27:58
  Once I knew how to fire a mortar and how
• 1:28:00
  to solve the gunnery solution and for indirect fire and all that sort of thing said okay now what.
• 1:28:01
  Now what. Yeah. And so I ended up through a buddy of mine. I found out that the Marine Corps had a
• 1:28:15
  thing called combat correspondent.
• 1:28:18
  And if you had a journalism background or
• 1:28:20
  if you were creative or you could write a
• 1:28:23
  little you know hometown newspaper story and do it well do it in an interesting fashion.
• 1:28:25
  There was a lot of work to do. And I think that's a very interesting thing. I think it's a very interesting thing. I think it's a very interesting thing. I think it's a very interesting thing. Kinda real torture story.
• 1:28:26
  There is death, and but it's MAT apes a pain in the entropy.
• 1:28:26
  I read that I was inwan he said, do what you wanted to do. Find more about your story and do it
• 1:28:27
  well, do it in a Trop cu fishing fashion
• 1:28:29
  your say you could literally write ui te
• 1:28:33
  your own ticket, work whatever the hell
• 1:28:36
  you wanted to do as long as you can
• 1:28:38
  produce the story there was favorable to
• 1:28:40
  the Marine Corps and celebrate the kid
• 1:28:41
  and that sort of thing.
• 1:28:47
  after it.
• 1:28:48
  And it worked out that way.
• 1:28:50
  I mean, they literally, they said, okay,
• 1:28:53
  I took a typing test and I had to rewrite
• 1:28:56
  a lead sentence a few times.
• 1:28:58
  And I said, well, this kid's good.
• 1:28:59
  And I had some high
• 1:29:00
  school journalism experience.
• 1:29:02
  Okay.
• 1:29:03
  So, they changed my MOS, my military
• 1:29:06
  occupational specialty, and I became a
• 1:29:09
  combat correspondent.
• 1:29:11
  At that point, though, I discovered that
• 1:29:14
  in the Marine Corps, and these double
• 1:29:16
  handful of these guys
• 1:29:17
  throughout the Marine Corps.
• 1:29:19
  And I found out very quickly that when
• 1:29:23
  you talk about a Marine Corps combat
• 1:29:25
  correspondent, the emphasis
• 1:29:26
  is on the first word, combat.
• 1:29:28
  So very shortly thereafter, I found my
• 1:29:30
  ass in Southeast Asia, and here we are.
• 1:29:33
  Okay.
• 1:29:33
  But it was great because I got to run
• 1:29:36
  with the grunts, and they used to call me
• 1:29:38
  Jar, or just another rifle.
• 1:29:40
  And that's essentially what I was.
• 1:29:44
  But it was, that's where
• 1:29:46
  I began to really observe.
• 1:29:49
  And what I discovered was that I had an
• 1:29:53
  insight, I had a catbird seat to observe
• 1:29:57
  the absolute best in human nature and the
• 1:30:00
  absolute worst in human nature, right on
• 1:30:02
  a firing line, in extremis.
• 1:30:05
  And I think that finally did it for me.
• 1:30:08
  That said, you know, this is so unique.
• 1:30:11
  This experience is so unique.
• 1:30:14
  And I didn't think about the thousands of
• 1:30:16
  other veterans from
• 1:30:17
  World War II or Korea.
• 1:30:18
  I said, no, this is unique.
• 1:30:20
  And so I pursued it.
• 1:30:22
  And it always came to me that somehow I
• 1:30:26
  had to find a way to paint that picture
• 1:30:28
  and let other people who hadn't had that
• 1:30:30
  experience know about it.
• 1:30:32
  Yeah.
• 1:30:32
  What a good, bad, and
• 1:30:33
  indifferent, let them know about it.
• 1:30:34
  And that kind of is, you know, the candle
• 1:30:37
  that I kept burning for 20 years.
• 1:30:41
  You said the best and the worst of
• 1:30:44
  humanity that you witnessed, right?
• 1:30:48
  And we, that's one of the common themes
• 1:30:51
  in our show that we try to remind people
• 1:30:53
  of is that, you know, in war, in the
• 1:30:55
  middle of a battle here out in
• 1:30:57
  Gettysburg, there's stories of, you know,
• 1:30:59
  guys just opening each other's skull with
• 1:31:02
  the butt of a musket and another of
• 1:31:04
  enemies giving each other kindness by
• 1:31:06
  crawling out into the middle of no man's
• 1:31:08
  land to give water to a guy crying for
• 1:31:10
  his mother and everything in between.
• 1:31:16
  And it is, it's, would you agree that
• 1:31:18
  it's the war is humanity,
• 1:31:22
  human nature in its most extreme?
• 1:31:24
  Well, sure it is.
• 1:31:25
  I mean, look, war is hell
• 1:31:26
  and it always will be that way.
• 1:31:28
  And there it is.
• 1:31:30
  But I think it's important that people
• 1:31:32
  understand it, if not
• 1:31:34
  from personal experience,
• 1:31:37
  understand it viscerally.
• 1:31:38
  And by painting pictures
• 1:31:40
  of that, we can do that.
• 1:31:41
  One of the reasons that I'm so happy and
• 1:31:43
  proud to be invited to be an advisor to
• 1:31:46
  the board of directors
• 1:31:49
  at the Gettysburg Museum of History is
• 1:31:52
  simply because they
• 1:31:53
  have that similar mission.
• 1:31:55
  They want to keep history alive,
• 1:31:57
  introduce it to people in a very visceral
• 1:32:00
  manner, because those artifacts and
• 1:32:03
  things that you see here at the museum,
• 1:32:06
  boy, that's a reminder.
• 1:32:07
  And they're very unique too.
• 1:32:09
  They are unique.
• 1:32:10
  And in some ways, there are things you
• 1:32:14
  would never see any place else.
• 1:32:15
  Absolutely not.
• 1:32:16
  And I find that that's educational.
• 1:32:20
  I agree.
• 1:32:21
  And by that, I mean, not so much that it
• 1:32:24
  gives you an introduction to
• 1:32:26
  history, the history of warfare.
• 1:32:29
  It certainly does that.
• 1:32:32
  But I think it's also a reminder.
• 1:32:36
  And this is one of the things that
• 1:32:38
  attracts me so much.
• 1:32:39
  It's a reminder of
• 1:32:41
  what war is really about.
• 1:32:46
  Here at the Museum of
• 1:32:47
  History, we don't have flags.
• 1:32:50
  We have flags with bullet holes and
• 1:32:52
  bloodstains on them.
• 1:32:54
  And that sort of thing.
• 1:32:56
  You see a youngster.
• 1:32:59
  I've seen youngsters down in the museum
• 1:33:01
  walk in here and look
• 1:33:02
  around and see that.
• 1:33:04
  Is that blood?
• 1:33:05
  Yeah, that's blood.
• 1:33:06
  And there's a reason that that's blood.
• 1:33:09
  So that's an invaluable asset and an
• 1:33:12
  invaluable mission, I think.
• 1:33:14
  It absolutely is.
• 1:33:18
  And the Gettysburg Museum of History to
• 1:33:21
  me is, first of all, it's a very unique
• 1:33:26
  place, like we've said.
• 1:33:27
  But it's a place that I wish more museums
• 1:33:33
  would take a cue from.
• 1:33:34
  But at the same time,
• 1:33:36
  I'm glad they don't.
• 1:33:37
  Because then if you go and see a museum
• 1:33:40
  like this everywhere else,
• 1:33:41
  it loses its specialness.
• 1:33:43
  But you come here and you see a museum.
• 1:33:44
  And you're in Gettysburg.
• 1:33:46
  And it's not just Civil War artifacts.
• 1:33:49
  It's from all over.
• 1:33:50
  And it's amazing all the stuff that he
• 1:33:51
  squeezes into that small space.
• 1:33:53
  Yeah, it is.
• 1:33:54
  And I'm urging Eric
• 1:33:56
  Dordham to spread it out.
• 1:33:58
  And I think he's got plans.
• 1:33:59
  Yeah, he does.
• 1:34:00
  He does.
• 1:34:00
  But it's overwhelming.
• 1:34:02
  It's so much.
• 1:34:03
  It is.
• 1:34:03
  It is.
• 1:34:04
  So when you, going back to Vietnam, and
• 1:34:09
  you're a journalist, but at some point,
• 1:34:14
  you get into just full combat, right?
• 1:34:16
  You're not a journalist, or are you a
• 1:34:17
  journalist throughout Vietnam?
• 1:34:20
  Well, yes and no.
• 1:34:22
  So the thing is, the thing about being a
• 1:34:24
  Marine Corps combat correspondent, as I
• 1:34:26
  said, the emphasis is on the word combat.
• 1:34:29
  And when you get an extremist, you're not
• 1:34:31
  sitting back there
• 1:34:32
  taking notes and pictures.
• 1:34:34
  You're shooting back and getting with it.
• 1:34:36
  And you have to do that so that the
• 1:34:40
  people with whom you're traveling, the
• 1:34:42
  people that you really want to talk to
• 1:34:44
  and you really hope will open up to you
• 1:34:46
  about their personal experience,
• 1:34:51
  if you don't do that, if you don't pull
• 1:34:53
  your own weight, if you're just a maggot
• 1:34:56
  that's hanging onto the corpse, they'll
• 1:34:59
  have nothing to do with you.
• 1:35:00
  And we knew that very quickly.
• 1:35:02
  Yeah. So you had to pull your weight.
• 1:35:05
  And often, the job was secondary.
• 1:35:09
  Well, I need to take some notes here.
• 1:35:11
  Well, piss on that.
• 1:35:14
  First of all, I got to deal with this
• 1:35:16
  machine gun up here.
• 1:35:17
  Right, right.
• 1:35:18
  So it was always a balancing act.
• 1:35:22
  And sometimes, I would come back from a
• 1:35:26
  bad combat operation
• 1:35:27
  and that sort of thing.
• 1:35:28
  And I would say, you know, I don't even
• 1:35:31
  know what the hell happened.
• 1:35:32
  Yeah.
• 1:35:32
  I got to make something up
• 1:35:33
  here because I got nothing.
• 1:35:35
  Well, so that's okay.
• 1:35:37
  So that's something there.
• 1:35:39
  You know, you get in
• 1:35:41
  a car accident, right?
• 1:35:43
  Everything's in slow motion
• 1:35:44
  when you remember it, right?
• 1:35:45
  Or if you can remember it at all.
• 1:35:47
  And I hear that a lot when I hear or read
• 1:35:52
  or hear accounts of combat where it's as
• 1:35:57
  if everything happened
• 1:35:58
  in slow motion, right?
• 1:35:59
  But you're not in slow motion, obviously.
• 1:36:02
  What do you think that is?
• 1:36:04
  I don't know.
• 1:36:04
  It's a form of tunnel vision, I think.
• 1:36:07
  Okay.
• 1:36:08
  Your focus becomes so tight on what's
• 1:36:11
  happening around you.
• 1:36:14
  Your focus is lost on
• 1:36:15
  what's happening around you.
• 1:36:17
  Your focus is on what's happening
• 1:36:18
  directly in front of you.
• 1:36:19
  Sure.
• 1:36:20
  And I think that tends to make it seem as
• 1:36:25
  though the action was slowing down.
• 1:36:27
  It's not.
• 1:36:28
  It's hot and heavy and
• 1:36:29
  furious and going on around.
• 1:36:30
  They're flying in both directions and
• 1:36:32
  tracers are arcing through the sky.
• 1:36:35
  And that's happening all across the
• 1:36:36
  firing line, if you will.
• 1:36:39
  But not to me.
• 1:36:40
  Right.
• 1:36:40
  To me, it's happening.
• 1:36:41
  This guy and me right
• 1:36:43
  here are trading shots.
• 1:36:45
  And I think that tends to be a slow
• 1:36:47
  motion effect with you.
• 1:36:50
  One of the most brilliant things that we
• 1:36:54
  saw in Saving Private Ryan, for instance,
• 1:36:57
  was the 90 degree shutter angle that the
• 1:37:00
  director of photography was using.
• 1:37:02
  So you could see the
• 1:37:03
  shrapnel fly and that sort of thing.
• 1:37:05
  Whereas if it was a 45
• 1:37:07
  angle, you'd just miss all that.
• 1:37:09
  A blur.
• 1:37:09
  All going.
• 1:37:09
  Yeah.
• 1:37:10
  And Spielberg did that very deliberately.
• 1:37:13
  He wanted that, you know, to slow it down
• 1:37:16
  without slowing the frame rate.
• 1:37:19
  Yeah.
• 1:37:19
  And he did.
• 1:37:19
  It was brilliant.
• 1:37:21
  And he took the coating
• 1:37:22
  off the lenses, too, I think.
• 1:37:24
  Yeah.
• 1:37:24
  I did.
• 1:37:25
  So when you...
• 1:37:28
  Okay, so tell me, if you
• 1:37:30
  will, about your first wound.
• 1:37:34
  Okay.
• 1:37:35
  The first one was
• 1:37:40
  I was firing...
• 1:37:41
  It was in way.
• 1:37:42
  I was firing cover for a squad that was
• 1:37:46
  trying to cross an intersection in the
• 1:37:49
  city of Hue, south
• 1:37:50
  side of the city of Hue.
• 1:37:52
  And I don't know, actually
• 1:37:53
  it was on the north side.
• 1:37:55
  And because I'm left handed, I was able
• 1:37:59
  to kind of peek around the corner without
• 1:38:01
  exposing myself too much and engage this
• 1:38:04
  weapon that was firing at the guys who
• 1:38:06
  were trying to cross the street.
• 1:38:07
  So I was in a cover position.
• 1:38:09
  Oh. And unfortunately, I was so focused on
• 1:38:12
  suppressing the fire that was coming in,
• 1:38:15
  I didn't look off to my left.
• 1:38:16
  And off to my left, about
• 1:38:18
  two stories up, was a sniper.
• 1:38:20
  And he fired at my head, but he hit the
• 1:38:25
  receiver of my M16, and
• 1:38:28
  it literally exploded.
• 1:38:31
  I got...
• 1:38:32
  The weapon just exploded.
• 1:38:33
  It almost tore my thumb off because my
• 1:38:35
  thumb was around the pistol grip.
• 1:38:37
  That exploded.
• 1:38:39
  Pieces of plastic were everywhere.
• 1:38:40
  And I has one sliver of plastic that went
• 1:38:44
  up under my chin, and it pinned my tongue
• 1:38:47
  to the roof of my mouth.
• 1:38:52
  And so I'm bleeding all over the place.
• 1:38:56
  You know, the head
• 1:38:56
  wounds just bleed terribly.
• 1:38:59
  And I staggered back toward the rear, and
• 1:39:02
  I was looking for a corpsman.
• 1:39:03
  You know, somebody had helped
• 1:39:04
  me, and I finally found one.
• 1:39:07
  He was in a casualty collection point,
• 1:39:10
  and he looked at me, and it was covered
• 1:39:12
  in blood, and he threw me down, and he
• 1:39:14
  said, "Where you hit?
• 1:39:15
  Where you hit?"
• 1:39:15
  And he said, "What's the matter?"
• 1:39:18
  He couldn't talk.
• 1:39:19
  He finally said, "Oh, I see."
• 1:39:21
  And he spotted the piece of plastic under
• 1:39:23
  my chin, and the bastard reached up and
• 1:39:26
  put his boot on my chest and just jerked
• 1:39:28
  that piece of plastic out of...
• 1:39:30
  I exploded all over him.
• 1:39:32
  Oh, God.
• 1:39:34
  And interestingly, one of the things that
• 1:39:37
  I will always remember about that
• 1:39:38
  incident was this corpsman, Doc Fred
• 1:39:43
  Geiss was his name, looked at me, and he
• 1:39:48
  looked around at the casualties, and
• 1:39:50
  literally just 20, 30 guys
• 1:39:52
  full of holes just laying around.
• 1:39:55
  And he said, "Damn, you know, trying to
• 1:39:58
  get through this waste city without
• 1:40:01
  getting hit is like trying to run between
• 1:40:03
  the damn raindrops and not get wet."
• 1:40:06
  And I said, "Whoa, quote that."
• 1:40:09
  And so the title of my first book
• 1:40:13
  is about Vietnam, and it's called "Run
• 1:40:15
  Between the Raindrops."
• 1:40:16
  Perfect title.
• 1:40:17
  Yeah.
• 1:40:17
  That's where that came from.
• 1:40:19
  So you received that when they take you
• 1:40:21
  back, patch you up
• 1:40:22
  and everything you get?
• 1:40:23
  Do you get your Purple Heart right away,
• 1:40:24
  or does it come later on?
• 1:40:25
  It's paperwork and it has to flow through
• 1:40:28
  the system, and eventually they show up
• 1:40:31
  and hang it on you, and you send it home
• 1:40:33
  to mom or something.
• 1:40:34
  Right, right.
• 1:40:35
  Yeah.
• 1:40:36
  Which, of course, isn't
• 1:40:37
  going to worry her, right?
• 1:40:38
  You got a Purple Heart.
• 1:40:40
  So you receive it.
• 1:40:42
  Now, do you have an option after you're
• 1:40:44
  hit to be done, or do they...
• 1:40:48
  It depends.
• 1:40:49
  If you're badly hit, I mean, to the point
• 1:40:51
  you're not going to recover in a month or
• 1:40:53
  two, yeah, they're going to send you.
• 1:40:56
  You're gone.
• 1:40:56
  Sure.
• 1:40:56
  They don't want you.
• 1:40:57
  And in the days of, say, 67 to 68, if you
• 1:41:01
  were hit three times,
• 1:41:03
  that was it for you.
• 1:41:05
  You beat your odds.
• 1:41:07
  Okay.
• 1:41:07
  So out you go.
• 1:41:08
  Okay.
• 1:41:09
  So there's three purples and a plane
• 1:41:10
  ticket, essentially what it was.
• 1:41:12
  But I wasn't going to have any part of
• 1:41:14
  that, and I was willing to do a lot more
• 1:41:16
  than that, but I
• 1:41:17
  didn't say a thing about it.
• 1:41:18
  So you go back.
• 1:41:22
  So this wasn't your worst wound?
• 1:41:24
  No.
• 1:41:25
  I was hit in the belly and once again in
• 1:41:27
  the head that were worse than that one.
• 1:41:30
  Really?
• 1:41:31
  Yeah.
• 1:41:32
  So, I mean, do you mind
• 1:41:33
  talking more about them?
• 1:41:34
  I don't like to get all gory, but I'll
• 1:41:39
  tell you about the torso wound.
• 1:41:42
  And I went to Vietnam with one navel and
• 1:41:46
  one asshole and came
• 1:41:48
  home with three and two.
• 1:41:50
  So you do the math.
• 1:41:53
  Okay.
• 1:41:54
  Gotcha.
• 1:41:55
  We'll leave the wounds alone now.
• 1:41:58
  Thank you for that.
• 1:42:01
  Okay.
• 1:42:01
  So you get the three purple hearts and
• 1:42:03
  then they send you
• 1:42:04
  home, is what you're saying?
• 1:42:06
  Well, and I was going to fight it anyway,
• 1:42:09
  but I had been hospitalized and and they
• 1:42:12
  want him to keep me back in the States
• 1:42:14
  and that sort of thing.
• 1:42:14
  And I said, no, I'm no,
• 1:42:16
  I'm not having any of it.
• 1:42:18
  And one of the things that convinced me
• 1:42:21
  that I needed to go back.
• 1:42:25
  They sent me while I was essentially on
• 1:42:30
  recovery in the hospital, they sent me on
• 1:42:32
  a, what's called a casualty call.
• 1:42:36
  And I went and assisted an officer who
• 1:42:38
  was going to notify a family.
• 1:42:42
  And the family was in Georgia, that their
• 1:42:46
  son had been killed.
• 1:42:49
  And we did that.
• 1:42:51
  And God, it was the hardest thing I'd
• 1:42:53
  ever, oh, Jesus, just,
• 1:42:55
  and a mother just went
• 1:42:57
  nuts, poor lady.
• 1:43:00
  And the dad was trying to be stoic and
• 1:43:04
  the little brothers
• 1:43:04
  and sisters were weeping.
• 1:43:06
  And I said, I can't do this.
• 1:43:08
  I just can't.
• 1:43:09
  I would rather it be me.
• 1:43:12
  And that's what made my decision.
• 1:43:13
  I'm going.
• 1:43:14
  That's gotta be the
• 1:43:15
  toughest job being that guy.
• 1:43:17
  Yeah.
• 1:43:18
  Casualty assistance contact officer.
• 1:43:20
  Now the scene of Private Ryan, when the
• 1:43:22
  telegram comes to the mother, is it in
• 1:43:24
  any way inspired by that?
• 1:43:26
  Well, I didn't write it.
• 1:43:27
  Well, I wish I had.
• 1:43:28
  I mean,
• 1:43:29
  both Bob Rodat and Steven Spielberg, I
• 1:43:32
  had told that story too.
• 1:43:34
  So I think there was something in that.
• 1:43:38
  Yeah.
• 1:43:39
  And they did it very well.
• 1:43:42
  They didn't dwell.
• 1:43:44
  When the car drives up and the mother's
• 1:43:48
  looking out the window, she knows.
• 1:43:49
  Yeah.
• 1:43:50
  And you don't need to go any further than
• 1:43:52
  that, cut onto the next scene and you
• 1:43:54
  know what's going to happen.
• 1:43:55
  Now, if that doesn't choke you up, I
• 1:43:57
  don't know what does now.
• 1:43:59
  And then so, okay.
• 1:44:01
  You stay in the
• 1:44:02
  Marines for 20 years total?
• 1:44:07
  20 years. 20 years.
• 1:44:08
  You're in Beirut.
• 1:44:10
  Yeah.
• 1:44:11
  So what's going on there?
• 1:44:13
  God, I wish we knew.
• 1:44:15
  I mean, it was, we were put in an
• 1:44:17
  absolutely impossible situation.
• 1:44:20
  And those of us who'd been in
• 1:44:21
  combat, and this was 1982, 83.
• 1:44:25
  So there were still a lot of us more
• 1:44:27
  senior guys who had been in
• 1:44:28
  Vietnam and been in combat.
• 1:44:30
  I don't know.
• 1:44:30
  We could see it coming.
• 1:44:31
  We could see it walking down the road
• 1:44:33
  that we were going to get nailed.
• 1:44:35
  And the problem was we had this
• 1:44:38
  impossible mission called presence.
• 1:44:40
  Be a presence so that the
• 1:44:42
  bad guys will not raise health.
• 1:44:46
  Well, look, we didn't even
• 1:44:47
  know who the bad guys were.
• 1:44:49
  Right.
• 1:44:49
  We would hear the Marabi tune is out
• 1:44:52
  there raising, what's a Marabi tune?
• 1:44:53
  Who the hell are they?
• 1:44:54
  Yeah.
• 1:44:55
  Sounds like something out of, you know,
• 1:44:56
  Walt Disney cartoon.
• 1:44:58
  Yeah, right.
• 1:44:59
  So we were really badly advised in terms
• 1:45:02
  of the threat because we weren't allowed
• 1:45:05
  diplomatically to talk to the Israelis or
• 1:45:07
  talk to the Lebanese and who had this
• 1:45:10
  intelligence that we could have used.
• 1:45:12
  Yeah.
• 1:45:12
  And then we had this, the business, there
• 1:45:15
  was a diplomatic fear about increasing
• 1:45:18
  the US footprint that would make it look
• 1:45:23
  as though we were taking sides in an
• 1:45:26
  international conflict.
• 1:45:29
  And the Brits were under the same
• 1:45:30
  problem, and the French were under the
• 1:45:31
  same problem, and the
• 1:45:32
  Italians were under the same problem.
• 1:45:35
  And we couldn't even talk to each other
• 1:45:37
  and share that sort of information.
• 1:45:39
  So why be there?
• 1:45:40
  Well, just because some people are jerks,
• 1:45:43
  you know, they just don't get it.
• 1:45:45
  Yeah.
• 1:45:46
  And you can't rob a combat situation or a
• 1:45:49
  potential combat situation
• 1:45:51
  by striped trouser diplomats.
• 1:45:53
  No.
• 1:45:54
  You just can't do that.
• 1:45:54
  No, you're right.
• 1:45:55
  Yeah.
• 1:45:55
  They don't get it.
• 1:45:57
  And so essentially, we were forced to
• 1:46:00
  disregard all the basic infantry stuff,
• 1:46:05
  like being on the high ground instead on
• 1:46:06
  the low ground around the airport, about
• 1:46:09
  controlling access to your own perimeter,
• 1:46:12
  about patrolling
• 1:46:13
  outside your own perimeter.
• 1:46:14
  We weren't allowed to do that.
• 1:46:17
  And, you know, we sold salts.
• 1:46:19
  We'd get together and look at this as,
• 1:46:21
  boy, this is about to turn into a shit
• 1:46:23
  sandwich right quick.
• 1:46:25
  And here it comes.
• 1:46:27
  And in October of 1983, it came, killed
• 1:46:30
  241 of us, one
• 1:46:31
  gas-enhanced truck bomb, essentially.
• 1:46:35
  And were you right there?
• 1:46:36
  No.
• 1:46:37
  No.
• 1:46:37
  No, I had gone.
• 1:46:38
  I rotated through a couple of marine
• 1:46:41
  amphibious units, and I stayed there
• 1:46:43
  because I thought that
• 1:46:44
  was where I should be.
• 1:46:45
  But about May, they
• 1:46:47
  decided, no, you need to go home.
• 1:46:49
  And so I was there from
• 1:46:51
  September of 82 through May of 83.
• 1:46:55
  I meant to ask this
• 1:46:56
  before, so I want to go back.
• 1:46:58
  You know, now, so you're
• 1:47:01
  of my parents' generation,
• 1:47:04
  and the stories that I heard about how
• 1:47:08
  the soldiers were treated
• 1:47:09
  when they came back from Vietnam.
• 1:47:11
  And even while they were over there, how
• 1:47:13
  people back here were working against
• 1:47:16
  them, in my estimation, even though they
• 1:47:19
  were saying they were working for them,
• 1:47:21
  it doesn't help when you're in country
• 1:47:22
  and people are undermining your mission.
• 1:47:27
  Did you get any of
• 1:47:29
  that when you came home?
• 1:47:30
  Yeah, I did.
• 1:47:31
  And look, the old wives tale about being
• 1:47:34
  spit on and all that sort
• 1:47:35
  of thing, I didn't get that.
• 1:47:37
  But I certainly got protests, and I
• 1:47:38
  certainly got people who didn't want to
• 1:47:40
  have anything to do with me because I
• 1:47:42
  wore a uniform and all that.
• 1:47:43
  That's what I meant.
• 1:47:44
  Ten years that went on.
• 1:47:46
  It upset me and angered me.
• 1:47:48
  And I encountered these people and said,
• 1:47:55
  "Well, you're full of crap, and I'm going
• 1:47:57
  to knock that," because I'd had done
• 1:47:58
  that, and I've killed somebody.
• 1:48:00
  And you don't want that.
• 1:48:03
  That's bad for your career.
• 1:48:05
  And so I just isolated myself.
• 1:48:08
  And I think over the years, one of the
• 1:48:12
  things I've learned is that bad juju,
• 1:48:16
  that horrible feeling in your gut,
• 1:48:20
  you've got to find a way to get that out.
• 1:48:22
  You have to sort of talk
• 1:48:24
  about it in some fashion,
• 1:48:26
  in some way.
• 1:48:27
  If you write about it, if you make motion
• 1:48:29
  pictures about it, if you make TV shows
• 1:48:30
  about it, you write books, you've got to
• 1:48:34
  exorcise those demons.
• 1:48:37
  And if you don't, what happens is they
• 1:48:39
  sit in there and they poison your system,
• 1:48:41
  and you become a crotchety old bastard
• 1:48:42
  nobody wants to talk about.
• 1:48:44
  And there were a lot of
• 1:48:45
  those, a lot of those guys.
• 1:48:48
  And I think what happened over the years,
• 1:48:51
  America recognized that they had confused
• 1:48:54
  the war with the warrior.
• 1:48:56
  And there was a knee jerk sort of
• 1:48:59
  swinging the other direction.
• 1:49:01
  And I think that was a good
• 1:49:03
  thing, but it was too late.
• 1:49:05
  And a lot of us had learned to ignore it.
• 1:49:10
  We'd learned to live with it.
• 1:49:12
  It became like a scam.
• 1:49:12
  You mean the swing back?
• 1:49:13
  No, no.
• 1:49:14
  The misery of the anti-Vietnam situation.
• 1:49:21
  We either crawled into the closet and
• 1:49:23
  said we were never in
• 1:49:24
  Vietnam, even though we were.
• 1:49:26
  Did you do that?
• 1:49:27
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:49:28
  That would be beyond me.
• 1:49:30
  I couldn't do that, but some did.
• 1:49:34
  And I think the problem there is that it
• 1:49:39
  took a while to get out of that closet,
• 1:49:40
  sometimes years, a decade, until people
• 1:49:44
  would say, okay, you guys pissed me off
• 1:49:47
  and you hurt me, but
• 1:49:51
  I'm going to forgive it.
• 1:49:53
  I'm going to forget about it.
• 1:49:53
  I'm going to go on with my life, or I'm
• 1:49:55
  going to sort of just
• 1:49:57
  say, okay, that's you.
• 1:49:59
  This is me.
• 1:50:00
  Here we go.
• 1:50:02
  And if there's a good thing that came of
• 1:50:05
  that, it's that my generation of veterans
• 1:50:10
  who fought in Southeast Asia suddenly
• 1:50:13
  became big advocates for the kids who
• 1:50:16
  went to Iraq and Saudi
• 1:50:17
  Arabia and all that sort of thing.
• 1:50:19
  We were the ones who were there sending
• 1:50:21
  them off with sage advice and celebrating
• 1:50:24
  their service and meeting the airplanes
• 1:50:26
  when they came in and welcome home and
• 1:50:29
  all that sort of thing.
• 1:50:31
  And that's probably the
• 1:50:33
  best thing that came out of it.
• 1:50:35
  We took our lumps.
• 1:50:39
  We got the snot beat out of us
• 1:50:40
  psychologically, viscerally.
• 1:50:43
  But we said, it'll never happen again.
• 1:50:46
  We're not letting this next generation of
• 1:50:48
  kids go to an interminable war in the
• 1:50:51
  Middle East and have that happen to them
• 1:50:53
  when they come home.
• 1:50:55
  So we stepped up, I think, in my
• 1:50:57
  generation of veterans, if we did
• 1:51:00
  anything right, and there's some who say
• 1:51:02
  we didn't do anything right, but if we
• 1:51:04
  did anything right, it was probably that.
• 1:51:06
  You had empathy for them.
• 1:51:09
  So now this is, when you get now to the
• 1:51:12
  80s, when you get into Hollywood,
• 1:51:16
  is the attitude towards
• 1:51:18
  Vietnam veterans still negative?
• 1:51:21
  Because Hollywood's pretty liberal.
• 1:51:23
  So yeah.
• 1:51:24
  It just permeated.
• 1:51:27
  And look, I knew that the truth of the
• 1:51:30
  matter was so much more
• 1:51:32
  interesting than the bullshit.
• 1:51:33
  I was seeing it from the
• 1:51:34
  screenwriting, sort of thing.
• 1:51:37
  The problem is when you're, I guess it's
• 1:51:40
  not a problem, it's a solution, but when
• 1:51:43
  you're ignorant, you can do a lot of
• 1:51:47
  things people tell you you can't do.
• 1:51:49
  And that was certainly my case.
• 1:51:51
  I'd seen every war movie there was, and
• 1:51:53
  the common denominator
• 1:51:54
  was, they pissed me off.
• 1:51:56
  So I said, I'm going to fix this.
• 1:51:57
  I'll go out to Hollywood and I'll find
• 1:51:59
  the guys who make these movies and I'll
• 1:52:01
  just unscrew their head.
• 1:52:03
  Things aren't done that way.
• 1:52:05
  And so I really found myself in a
• 1:52:11
  Sisyphean mission, trying to push a rock
• 1:52:14
  uphill all the time.
• 1:52:15
  And I just wasn't getting any traction.
• 1:52:19
  But I was learning some things, how
• 1:52:21
  movies are made and
• 1:52:22
  all that sort of thing.
• 1:52:23
  But what gave you the, I mean, okay, I
• 1:52:25
  understand being pissed that Hollywood's
• 1:52:27
  not getting it right.
• 1:52:28
  A lot of Americans are pissed that
• 1:52:30
  Hollywood doesn't get war movies, right?
• 1:52:31
  Especially if you're a
• 1:52:32
  history buff or a veteran.
• 1:52:35
  But what is it that makes you, where were
• 1:52:37
  you living before you moved to Hollywood?
• 1:52:39
  Well, all over the place, really.
• 1:52:41
  I was in Louisiana and in Texas and...
• 1:52:46
  But like the last place
• 1:52:47
  before you went to California.
• 1:52:48
  I think it was Houston, Texas.
• 1:52:50
  So you're in Houston, Texas and you're
• 1:52:52
  sitting there and you go,
• 1:52:54
  "Ah, you know what?
• 1:52:55
  I think I'm going to go to Hollywood and
• 1:52:57
  I'm going to tell them
• 1:52:57
  that they need me to advise."
• 1:52:59
  A little more to the story than that.
• 1:53:01
  Okay.
• 1:53:01
  Yeah.
• 1:53:01
  But what was the story?
• 1:53:03
  Look, and I've said this
• 1:53:05
  before, but it's really true.
• 1:53:07
  I was sitting in a Motel 6 in Houston,
• 1:53:11
  Texas, out of a job, out of prospects,
• 1:53:16
  disgruntled, pissed off, didn't know
• 1:53:18
  really what I was going to
• 1:53:19
  do with the rest of my life.
• 1:53:21
  So I said, "All right, I
• 1:53:23
  got to figure this out.
• 1:53:24
  I'm capable of thinking I
• 1:53:26
  need to figure this out."
• 1:53:28
  So I went down to a 7-Eleven, Circle K it
• 1:53:32
  may have been in those days, and I bought
• 1:53:35
  a yellow legal tablet and a box of
• 1:53:40
  crayons and a case of beer.
• 1:53:43
  Of course.
• 1:53:44
  And I went back to the Motel and I said,
• 1:53:46
  "Now I'm going to sit here until I figure
• 1:53:50
  out what my assets and what my
• 1:53:52
  liabilities are and what I'm going to do
• 1:53:54
  with the rest of my life."
• 1:53:56
  So I broke out a crayon and I drew a line
• 1:53:59
  down the center of that yellow legal pad
• 1:54:01
  and I wrote assets on one side and
• 1:54:03
  liabilities on the other side.
• 1:54:06
  And then I started drinking beer.
• 1:54:08
  And by about dawn, the beer was gone and
• 1:54:12
  I looked over my notes and I had
• 1:54:14
  something like 15 pages of liabilities
• 1:54:16
  and about three lines of assets.
• 1:54:19
  Sounds like me.
• 1:54:20
  Yeah.
• 1:54:21
  And the upshot was that this business
• 1:54:26
  always being a movie fan of seeing every
• 1:54:29
  military movie there
• 1:54:30
  was, was kind of an asset.
• 1:54:32
  And I said, "Wait a minute, if I get
• 1:54:34
  involved in that business, I'll just go
• 1:54:36
  out there and I'll change everything and
• 1:54:38
  I'll have a great time and go give me a
• 1:54:40
  bunch of money and I'll
• 1:54:41
  just be famous and wonderful."
• 1:54:43
  As I said, it didn't work quite that way.
• 1:54:47
  I would go on to movie lots and find the
• 1:54:50
  first guy carrying a briefcase and
• 1:54:51
  wearing a tie and a costume.
• 1:54:53
  "Come here, you're a producer, you make
• 1:54:55
  war movies where you're screwed up and
• 1:54:57
  here's how I'm going to unscrew you."
• 1:54:58
  Because everybody loves that.
• 1:55:00
  That's the best approach.
• 1:55:01
  Jesus.
• 1:55:02
  And so they'd arrest me
• 1:55:05
  and throw me off the lot.
• 1:55:06
  Right.
• 1:55:07
  But I had learned to read the trade
• 1:55:10
  papers, Daily Variety and Drama Log and
• 1:55:13
  all that sort of thing.
• 1:55:14
  And I saw this little blurb in, I think
• 1:55:19
  it was Army Archer's column in Daily
• 1:55:21
  Variety, that said a relatively
• 1:55:23
  heretofore, relatively unknown
• 1:55:25
  writer-director by the name of Oliver
• 1:55:29
  Stone is going to do this war movie based
• 1:55:31
  on his own experience as a combat
• 1:55:33
  infantryman in Vietnam.
• 1:55:34
  And I said, "Yes, if anybody's going to
• 1:55:36
  know what I'm trying to
• 1:55:38
  do here, it'll be Stone."
• 1:55:41
  So through a series of machinations I
• 1:55:44
  can't really tell you about because the
• 1:55:45
  statute of limitations
• 1:55:47
  may not have run out yet.
• 1:55:49
  I was able to get a couple of minutes
• 1:55:51
  with Stone and I did my
• 1:55:52
  best three-minute pitch.
• 1:55:54
  I said, "Here's what's
• 1:55:55
  wrong with war movies.
• 1:55:56
  Here's why it's wrong.
• 1:55:58
  You know this.
• 1:55:59
  I know this.
• 1:56:00
  And here's how we fix it."
• 1:56:02
  And that was really the genesis of
• 1:56:08
  the business of immersive training prior
• 1:56:11
  to any footage being shot at all.
• 1:56:14
  So you didn't have a program yet.
• 1:56:17
  This is where you developed the program?
• 1:56:19
  I mean, except for being a Marine.
• 1:56:21
  It was in the back of my mind.
• 1:56:23
  I knew that if I used the way we train
• 1:56:26
  Marines to train actors with certain
• 1:56:29
  limitations, that they
• 1:56:31
  couldn't miss the message.
• 1:56:33
  And so I began to develop that and expand
• 1:56:36
  it and come up with how
• 1:56:38
  I was going to do this.
• 1:56:40
  And one of the things that I did, which
• 1:56:43
  is kind of unique to the Captain Dye
• 1:56:47
  method, is I would, once a
• 1:56:50
  day, and a day was 24 hours.
• 1:56:53
  We worked all night, night
• 1:56:55
  ambushes, all that sort of thing.
• 1:56:57
  I would do a thing called stand down.
• 1:57:01
  Usually just before or
• 1:57:03
  just after evening, chow.
• 1:57:05
  And I ate twice a day if they
• 1:57:06
  didn't piss me off that day.
• 1:57:07
  If they'd piss me
• 1:57:07
  off, they only ate once.
• 1:57:11
  And the stand down was their one
• 1:57:13
  opportunity in every day to ask me any
• 1:57:17
  question they'd always wondered about.
• 1:57:20
  And I said, "I don't
• 1:57:21
  care how deep you get.
• 1:57:22
  I don't care how psychological you get.
• 1:57:24
  I don't care what kind of
• 1:57:25
  babble you want to come up with.
• 1:57:27
  If you've got that question, you need an
• 1:57:29
  answer, and I will try
• 1:57:31
  to provide that answer."
• 1:57:32
  And that turned out to be the magic.
• 1:57:36
  And the weirdest damn things, they'd
• 1:57:39
  think about what they were going to do in
• 1:57:41
  the movie, and it was the only time
• 1:57:43
  during the day they were allowed to do
• 1:57:44
  that, and then say, "You know, he's going
• 1:57:48
  to inject me with morphine.
• 1:57:49
  How's that done?
• 1:57:50
  What's a morphine-serret look like?
• 1:57:52
  What does it feel like?"
• 1:57:54
  And actors are like little dry sponges.
• 1:57:57
  If you give them that information, pour
• 1:57:58
  that water on it, the sponge
• 1:57:59
  expands and becomes useful.
• 1:58:02
  And that really was, I think, was the
• 1:58:05
  magic of the whole thing.
• 1:58:07
  I've heard in some of the interviews,
• 1:58:10
  actually probably all of the interviews
• 1:58:11
  I've watched with you, you said something
• 1:58:15
  like you want to get into the actors, you
• 1:58:20
  want them to get into the heart, mind,
• 1:58:22
  and guts of a soldier.
• 1:58:26
  And I love that term.
• 1:58:28
  People usually say heart, mind, and soul,
• 1:58:30
  but you said guts, which is pretty good.
• 1:58:32
  Because it's that kind of internal
• 1:58:36
  visceral experience that I'm trying to
• 1:58:37
  get them to understand.
• 1:58:39
  Look, you can sit and
• 1:58:40
  lecture them all day.
• 1:58:42
  You can have dog and pony shows that tell
• 1:58:44
  them how to handle a weapon, how to wear
• 1:58:46
  their equipment, and that sort of thing.
• 1:58:50
  And where does the mud go?
• 1:58:53
  That's all superficial.
• 1:58:55
  I wanted to get in their guts.
• 1:58:59
  I wanted them to understand that diary,
• 1:59:02
  churning, gut feeling that when the
• 1:59:06
  defecation hits the oscillation around
• 1:59:08
  you and you're focused here.
• 1:59:11
  I wanted them to have
• 1:59:12
  some inkling of that.
• 1:59:15
  And I would often say, I'd pull them
• 1:59:18
  aside one on one and I'd say, "Listen,
• 1:59:20
  what's the most dangerous
• 1:59:22
  thing you've ever done?"
• 1:59:24
  Well, I fell out of a
• 1:59:25
  tree one time and...
• 1:59:26
  Okay, look, do you remember how terrified
• 1:59:28
  you were on the way down?
• 1:59:30
  Yeah, I cried.
• 1:59:31
  I said, "Yeah, that's it."
• 1:59:34
  And so you teach them that kind of lesson
• 1:59:36
  because to be a leader in the military,
• 1:59:40
  you really have to be a part-time shrink.
• 1:59:42
  You really have to understand people.
• 1:59:45
  And I had made a study of this.
• 1:59:47
  And each man, each individual, later I
• 1:59:53
  started training females and that was all
• 1:59:55
  a different story, but each individual
• 1:59:58
  has a set of buttons,
• 2:00:01
  psychological buttons.
• 2:00:03
  You got to find those buttons and they're
• 2:00:05
  often very well hidden.
• 2:00:07
  And then you mash that button, you mash
• 2:00:09
  that bastard until he
• 2:00:10
  understands what the deal is.
• 2:00:12
  And that was really the key to it, I think.
• 2:00:14
  And you're putting them in, like with
• 2:00:16
  Platoon, for example, you're out in the
• 2:00:18
  bush for like, what, three weeks?
• 2:00:20
  Three weeks in the
• 2:00:21
  jungle of the Philippines.
• 2:00:22
  And you've got guys setting up
• 2:00:25
  pyrotechnics and you actually have no
• 2:00:27
  idea that you're about to call in a
• 2:00:29
  mortar attack or
• 2:00:30
  something like that, right?
• 2:00:31
  Nope, they don't.
• 2:00:33
  To me, that's, you know what that's like?
• 2:00:36
  Hondo, movie Hondo.
• 2:00:39
  John Wayne picks a little boy up when he
• 2:00:40
  finds out he can't swim and
• 2:00:41
  he throws him in the water.
• 2:00:42
  That's what you're doing there.
• 2:00:43
  That's a Hondo method.
• 2:00:45
  That's what you're doing.
• 2:00:47
  But I think for, you know, I've met some
• 2:00:50
  actors in my day and it's amazing to me.
• 2:00:55
  Actually, I interviewed Tom Berenger and
• 2:00:57
  he speaks so highly.
• 2:00:59
  I was interviewing him about the movie
• 2:01:00
  Gettysburg and he kept
• 2:01:02
  talking about Platoon and you.
• 2:01:05
  He has a lot of respect for you and a lot
• 2:01:07
  of these guys seem to have a lot of
• 2:01:08
  respect for you because you, I mean, dare
• 2:01:11
  I say, it might be the first time they
• 2:01:13
  come close to being a man, right?
• 2:01:14
  You know, I become uncle captain.
• 2:01:16
  Yeah.
• 2:01:17
  The Dutch uncle and you'd be surprised.
• 2:01:19
  What surprised me was
• 2:01:21
  how this imprinted on them.
• 2:01:25
  I don't know what many of their home
• 2:01:27
  lives were difficult, but
• 2:01:30
  they would imprint on me.
• 2:01:32
  And, you know, 10 years after I'd trained
• 2:01:35
  a kid for a certain movie and hadn't
• 2:01:37
  heard from him, the phone rings and it's
• 2:01:40
  one of my kids and he's wondering about a
• 2:01:43
  part and he wants to talk to uncle
• 2:01:44
  captain about that part.
• 2:01:46
  How do I do this?
• 2:01:47
  Yeah.
• 2:01:48
  And that that's tremendously gratifying.
• 2:01:51
  That's tremendously rewarding.
• 2:01:53
  I would imagine so.
• 2:01:55
  And so Platoon, you say that's the first
• 2:02:00
  movie, but wasn't there a movie about
• 2:02:02
  Martians and Marigans?
• 2:02:03
  Yeah, there was.
• 2:02:03
  Yeah.
• 2:02:04
  Thank you for bringing that up.
• 2:02:05
  Well, you brought it up.
• 2:02:07
  I was trying to figure out
• 2:02:09
  how the movie business worked.
• 2:02:12
  And I had this buddy from Vietnam who was
• 2:02:16
  a storyboard artist.
• 2:02:17
  Okay.
• 2:02:18
  And he was working for the old Canon
• 2:02:20
  films, a lot of B-movie grind outs.
• 2:02:25
  And he said, well, you know, I'm working
• 2:02:27
  on this film called Invaders from Mars,
• 2:02:29
  which was a remake of
• 2:02:30
  a 1952 trash classic.
• 2:02:33
  And he said, in this version, the Marines
• 2:02:36
  killed the Martians.
• 2:02:37
  And I said, well, shit, I got no
• 2:02:39
  compunction about killing Martians.
• 2:02:42
  Let me go to work on this.
• 2:02:43
  And so he got me an introduction to Toby
• 2:02:46
  Hooper, who was the director,
• 2:02:48
  a wonderful little curmudgeon.
• 2:02:50
  And he said, well, I don't know how
• 2:02:52
  Marines go about killing Martians.
• 2:02:54
  Well, I do, Toby.
• 2:02:55
  Let me do this.
• 2:02:56
  And I started, I would create these
• 2:02:58
  combat scenes with these fake Martians.
• 2:03:02
  And that kind of what it did, was it, I
• 2:03:07
  went to school during that production of
• 2:03:09
  that film to learn, you
• 2:03:11
  know, what does a prop guy do?
• 2:03:13
  What's a gaffer?
• 2:03:14
  You know, what's a grip?
• 2:03:15
  And I learned all that stuff.
• 2:03:17
  So I had that, I thought
• 2:03:19
  I had the basic school.
• 2:03:21
  I just had to find somebody
• 2:03:23
  who would let me put it to work.
• 2:03:24
  And I found that when I
• 2:03:25
  got stone and platoon.
• 2:03:27
  But didn't you go to the local Marine
• 2:03:30
  base and like, I did.
• 2:03:31
  Yeah.
• 2:03:33
  I threw my Marine card on the table and I
• 2:03:36
  talked this reserve officer, who was down
• 2:03:40
  in Long Beach running a reserve unit.
• 2:03:43
  And I talked him into
• 2:03:45
  lending me about 50 Marines.
• 2:03:48
  Yeah.
• 2:03:48
  And he made it their duty to come up and
• 2:03:50
  report to me on the set.
• 2:03:52
  So I had my own company there and I just
• 2:03:54
  ran them through this stuff.
• 2:03:55
  And they had a great time.
• 2:03:57
  Sure.
• 2:03:57
  And I said, Oh man, listen,
• 2:03:59
  there's something to this.
• 2:04:00
  I just have to find the opportunity to
• 2:04:02
  show them the way I want to do it.
• 2:04:04
  So that was your, that was your pilot
• 2:04:06
  program kind of just to
• 2:04:07
  see if it was worth pursuing.
• 2:04:09
  Yeah.
• 2:04:10
  Right.
• 2:04:10
  Cause it was a low budget film.
• 2:04:11
  I'm assuming.
• 2:04:12
  Like a no budget film.
• 2:04:14
  I don't know.
• 2:04:15
  I don't know what the hell it was.
• 2:04:16
  They didn't pay me anything.
• 2:04:17
  Right.
• 2:04:19
  But then, so you go on.
• 2:04:20
  So platoon wins some Oscars, right?
• 2:04:24
  Best picture, best director.
• 2:04:25
  Yeah.
• 2:04:26
  So you and Oliver Stone are set, right?
• 2:04:30
  It's a skyrocket from that moment on.
• 2:04:32
  Good luck talisman, I think.
• 2:04:33
  Yeah.
• 2:04:34
  And I think I've done
• 2:04:34
  five pictures with him now.
• 2:04:37
  And, and I just saw him not long ago in
• 2:04:39
  Phoenix at another film festival, but
• 2:04:41
  next time you see him, tell
• 2:04:42
  him he's one of my favorites.
• 2:04:44
  I'm sure, I'm sure he won't care.
• 2:04:46
  Please tell him he's one
• 2:04:47
  of my favorite directors.
• 2:04:49
  And he's always, and he'll be like, Oh,
• 2:04:50
  yeah, he's, he's an interesting guy.
• 2:04:52
  And he, he would put me to
• 2:04:54
  work when nobody else would.
• 2:04:57
  And he's got to turn me into an actor.
• 2:04:59
  Yeah.
• 2:04:59
  He said, look, you're a natural.
• 2:05:03
  The camera loves you.
• 2:05:05
  And if you ever take an acting lesson, if
• 2:05:07
  you ever go to school,
• 2:05:08
  I'll never hire you again.
• 2:05:10
  I said, shit, really?
• 2:05:12
  And he said, yep, absolutely.
• 2:05:14
  You do what you do.
• 2:05:15
  You be you.
• 2:05:17
  And it's best advice I ever got.
• 2:05:19
  Really.
• 2:05:20
  So that was the next thing I wanted to
• 2:05:21
  get to was you are an
• 2:05:23
  actually very good actor.
• 2:05:26
  And so there's no lessons there.
• 2:05:27
  This is just you.
• 2:05:29
  There's every time I'm on a set, there's
• 2:05:32
  lessons, uh, not formal.
• 2:05:35
  That's right.
• 2:05:35
  That's what I mean.
• 2:05:36
  Yeah.
• 2:05:36
  But I observe.
• 2:05:37
  I mean, I'm that consummate observer.
• 2:05:39
  See, that's again, artists.
• 2:05:41
  And I listen and, and watch and I'll see
• 2:05:43
  the little things that they'll do.
• 2:05:45
  And I said, damn, I
• 2:05:47
  got to incorporate that.
• 2:05:48
  I can, I can use that.
• 2:05:49
  Uh, so some of the best actors in the
• 2:05:52
  world taught me to be an actor.
• 2:05:53
  They just didn't know they were doing it.
• 2:05:54
  Yeah.
• 2:05:54
  That's so cool.
• 2:05:56
  Um, what was the first
• 2:05:57
  speaking role you had?
• 2:05:58
  It was in platoon.
• 2:05:59
  Uh, to guess it was.
• 2:06:00
  Yeah.
• 2:06:01
  Yeah.
• 2:06:01
  Yeah.
• 2:06:02
  And, uh, now you gotta, you ever, well,
• 2:06:05
  what are the roles you've had?
• 2:06:07
  Private Ryan, Colonel Sink in band of
• 2:06:09
  brothers, which I thought actually was
• 2:06:11
  perfect casting, um, that whole show, but
• 2:06:15
  you, you as Colonel Sink was great.
• 2:06:18
  And you know, again, knowing by that
• 2:06:19
  point, when that came out, knowing that
• 2:06:21
  you're the guy that does the boot camp.
• 2:06:22
  And I was like, that's really cool that
• 2:06:24
  they put him in the, in the show like
• 2:06:26
  that as their commander.
• 2:06:27
  Yeah.
• 2:06:27
  It's, it's funny.
• 2:06:28
  The, um, my reputation precedes and
• 2:06:32
  exceeds me, but, uh, sure.
• 2:06:36
  But it really, you know, I've, I've tried
• 2:06:39
  throughout my career to find that odd
• 2:06:43
  homosexual
• 2:06:44
  hairdresser part that, you know,
• 2:06:47
  you can't get it.
• 2:06:48
  I don't get a lot of offers.
• 2:06:51
  Um, so, I mean, between me and Lee Army,
• 2:06:53
  we were the most
• 2:06:53
  typecast guy in the world.
• 2:06:55
  Yeah.
• 2:06:55
  Yeah.
• 2:06:56
  Um, but we love you guys.
• 2:06:57
  I mean, we love seeing
• 2:06:58
  you guys in these roles.
• 2:06:59
  Well, I've, I've finally come to realize,
• 2:07:02
  and, and so I don't bitch about it.
• 2:07:03
  We don't want to see you as the
• 2:07:04
  homosexual hairdresser.
• 2:07:05
  We want to see you as the army guy, you
• 2:07:08
  know, or now, oh, that's
• 2:07:09
  what I wanted to ask you.
• 2:07:10
  So you're a Marine.
• 2:07:12
  Okay.
• 2:07:12
  Um, I can't remember in platoon where
• 2:07:15
  they were, they were Marines.
• 2:07:16
  No army.
• 2:07:16
  They were army.
• 2:07:17
  Okay.
• 2:07:18
  So then what is
• 2:07:21
  the difference in the manual between the
• 2:07:24
  army and the Marines?
• 2:07:25
  And, and does, is that,
• 2:07:27
  there's a world of difference.
• 2:07:28
  Look, I have, we've done, I mean, the
• 2:07:30
  motto of my company, Warriors Global is
• 2:07:32
  from the Peloponnesian Wars to Star Wars.
• 2:07:35
  We will do it all.
• 2:07:35
  And we have done it all.
• 2:07:37
  Yeah.
• 2:07:37
  Um, Starship Troopers.
• 2:07:39
  Yeah.
• 2:07:39
  Yeah.
• 2:07:39
  But it, it really takes research.
• 2:07:42
  Um, and that's the problem.
• 2:07:44
  Most kids who want to do what I do had
• 2:07:46
  four years in the army
• 2:07:47
  and that's all they know.
• 2:07:48
  Right.
• 2:07:48
  I've been an
• 2:07:49
  inveterate student all my life.
• 2:07:52
  I mean, I know how the Navy does things.
• 2:07:54
  I know how the air force does things, the
• 2:07:55
  coast guard, the army, and I know those
• 2:07:58
  details and I study those details.
• 2:08:01
  So you have to, you
• 2:08:02
  have to be a playmaker.
• 2:08:03
  You have to know it all.
• 2:08:05
  You have a team, obviously.
• 2:08:07
  It's not just you.
• 2:08:09
  Yeah.
• 2:08:10
  I mean, look, I run my company and I run
• 2:08:14
  a publishing company.
• 2:08:15
  And I hire guys that, I mean, my, my
• 2:08:19
  executive officer has
• 2:08:21
  been with me for 50 years.
• 2:08:22
  We were, we were young corporals together
• 2:08:24
  in Vietnam and I talked
• 2:08:25
  him into becoming my guy.
• 2:08:27
  That's great.
• 2:08:28
  So, and, and we hire, I hire some people,
• 2:08:31
  mostly it's piecework because, um,
• 2:08:33
  military movies are on
• 2:08:34
  a kind of a sign curve.
• 2:08:35
  You have a bunch of them for a while and
• 2:08:38
  then nothing for 10 years.
• 2:08:40
  So you got to find a way to keep busy.
• 2:08:43
  Um, and so my guys are piecework.
• 2:08:45
  I call them in when I need them.
• 2:08:46
  Um, and, and I quickly realized that
• 2:08:49
  because of that sign curve, uh, if I'm
• 2:08:52
  going to have a successful company, uh,
• 2:08:55
  I'm going to need to do something besides
• 2:08:57
  movies and television.
• 2:08:59
  So I started doing video games.
• 2:09:00
  I started doing a themed entertainment
• 2:09:02
  for parks and, and, and that's led to
• 2:09:05
  some really smart, interesting stuff.
• 2:09:08
  Yeah.
• 2:09:08
  I don't know how smart it is.
• 2:09:09
  It matters.
• 2:09:10
  Survival, I think.
• 2:09:11
  Well, but it's still, well, some people
• 2:09:13
  wouldn't come up with that
• 2:09:14
  and they wouldn't survive.
• 2:09:15
  So, you know, that's very smart.
• 2:09:17
  So you get, you get a
• 2:09:18
  phone call from Las Vegas.
• 2:09:20
  The Las Vegas Hilton has this, uh, uh,
• 2:09:24
  ride experience, the
• 2:09:26
  Star Trek experience.
• 2:09:27
  And they call me and they want me to come
• 2:09:30
  up and train their, make
• 2:09:31
  the cue video for them.
• 2:09:33
  And then, uh, train the people how to be
• 2:09:36
  Starship troopers, you know, in the 25th
• 2:09:39
  century and that sort of thing.
• 2:09:40
  Right.
• 2:09:41
  So you get weird calls
• 2:09:42
  like that and I love it.
• 2:09:43
  Yeah.
• 2:09:44
  So what, what was your, do you have a
• 2:09:46
  favorite project you worked on?
• 2:09:47
  Like one that was
• 2:09:48
  just the best experience?
• 2:09:49
  Oh, look, that's got
• 2:09:50
  to be Band of Brothers.
• 2:09:51
  Yeah.
• 2:09:53
  The mini series format, you know, 10
• 2:09:55
  episodes and that sort of thing.
• 2:09:56
  You can, you can really
• 2:09:58
  deeply get into the
• 2:09:59
  story and the characters.
• 2:10:01
  Uh, so that format is great.
• 2:10:04
  I love that.
• 2:10:05
  I loved doing, uh, um,
• 2:10:07
  Rough Riders with Tom Barris.
• 2:10:09
  Oh yeah.
• 2:10:10
  Yeah.
• 2:10:11
  I played Tom's, I played,
• 2:10:13
  uh, Colonel Leonard Wood.
• 2:10:15
  That's right.
• 2:10:17
  Rough Riders Commander.
• 2:10:18
  Yes.
• 2:10:19
  Um, that's a good one.
• 2:10:21
  Uh, Platoon will always have a close
• 2:10:23
  place in my heart because it started my
• 2:10:26
  career, it started my career.
• 2:10:27
  Right.
• 2:10:28
  But I think, I think Band of Brothers,
• 2:10:30
  Saving Private Ryan, um,
• 2:10:32
  and all of those movies.
• 2:10:34
  And, and I've, I've done an interesting
• 2:10:36
  bunch of, uh, work with Tom Cruz.
• 2:10:40
  Uh, I worked with him on, uh, Born on the
• 2:10:42
  4th of July, uh, where I got to know me
• 2:10:44
  and I didn't realize it,
• 2:10:46
  but Tom really liked me.
• 2:10:47
  Okay.
• 2:10:48
  Um, I wasn't in any mood to be
• 2:10:51
  a buddy or anything like that.
• 2:10:52
  Yeah.
• 2:10:53
  But you're a Scientologist now.
• 2:10:54
  Yeah.
• 2:10:54
  And I'm not sure how much Tom is anymore,
• 2:10:58
  but, um, but lo and behold, um, when we
• 2:11:02
  started doing Mission Impossible, I found
• 2:11:05
  out that Tom wanted me to be one of the
• 2:11:07
  agents that chased him across the
• 2:11:09
  country, around the globe.
• 2:11:11
  Um, and then I get a call one day and
• 2:11:14
  it's Tom's people saying, look, Tom wants
• 2:11:16
  you to play his father in a
• 2:11:19
  movie called Night and Day.
• 2:11:20
  Hmm.
• 2:11:21
  And it turns out I, I played his dad.
• 2:11:23
  That's awesome.
• 2:11:24
  Yeah.
• 2:11:24
  It was so those, those
• 2:11:26
  relationships are long lasting.
• 2:11:27
  See, it's always who you
• 2:11:28
  know, after the beginning, right?
• 2:11:31
  After you prove yourself,
• 2:11:32
  then it's just who you know.
• 2:11:33
  Right.
• 2:11:34
  That's how a lot of jobs come about.
• 2:11:36
  Well, yes.
• 2:11:38
  Um, but there's so much
• 2:11:39
  money involved in making a movie.
• 2:11:41
  I mean, 130 million is chump chain.
• 2:11:44
  Yeah, I know that, um, you
• 2:11:46
  do have to campaign for it.
• 2:11:48
  You have to, I mean, the phone rings
• 2:11:50
  usually when they need me, but if I want
• 2:11:52
  something, I have to go out and chase it.
• 2:11:55
  But you're legendary.
• 2:11:56
  I mean, forgive me for flattering you too
• 2:11:58
  much here, but you, you know, how are
• 2:12:00
  people not knocking
• 2:12:01
  them out to God's you?
• 2:12:04
  I do have a bit of a
• 2:12:07
  legendary baggage, I guess.
• 2:12:09
  Um, but that's great.
• 2:12:10
  I mean, that, but that
• 2:12:11
  bring me, bring me captain die.
• 2:12:12
  He's not a, well, bring me
• 2:12:13
  somebody that looks like captain.
• 2:12:15
  No, wait a minute.
• 2:12:15
  Bring me somebody that
• 2:12:16
  says big as captain die.
• 2:12:18
  You know, give me a die type.
• 2:12:19
  Yeah.
• 2:12:20
  Yeah. I feel like a die type.
• 2:12:21
  What would you say is the acting role
• 2:12:26
  that you had that you're most proud of
• 2:12:27
  that you think is your best work?
• 2:12:31
  Uh, I guess, I guess
• 2:12:32
  it would be two things.
• 2:12:34
  Um, one was, uh,
• 2:12:35
  Leonard Wood and rough riders.
• 2:12:38
  I love that, that experience.
• 2:12:41
  And the other is Colonel
• 2:12:41
  Cenk and Vanda brothers.
• 2:12:43
  Yeah.
• 2:12:44
  Yeah.
• 2:12:44
  Colonel Cenk is great.
• 2:12:45
  My favorite scene is when, cause you're,
• 2:12:49
  you're relationship with Winters or
• 2:12:51
  Cenk's relationship with Winters.
• 2:12:53
  I think you and Damien
• 2:12:54
  Lewis do it really well.
• 2:12:55
  We understood that really.
• 2:12:56
  Yeah.
• 2:12:57
  Well, because in bootcamp,
• 2:13:00
  right, you're in charge of all of them,
• 2:13:02
  but he's in charge of that.
• 2:13:03
  And he used every bit of that.
• 2:13:04
  Yeah.
• 2:13:05
  Which is great.
• 2:13:06
  And when, uh, in the foil scene, when
• 2:13:08
  you're attacking the village and he goes
• 2:13:10
  with your voice, you just yell at him.
• 2:13:14
  Yeah.
• 2:13:14
  And he reacted instantly because he,
• 2:13:16
  recognized that voice.
• 2:13:18
  They're very fine actors out there, but,
• 2:13:19
  uh, to put them through the bootcamp like
• 2:13:23
  you do, I think it shows
• 2:13:27
  more in the performance.
• 2:13:29
  It's almost like a documentary.
• 2:13:31
  You're documenting.
• 2:13:32
  And that's my Oscar.
• 2:13:33
  Yeah.
• 2:13:34
  That's my Academy Award.
• 2:13:35
  When I see those guys
• 2:13:36
  sing out there like that.
• 2:13:37
  Well, captain Dale, die, you, uh, or
• 2:13:40
  someone I've always admired.
• 2:13:41
  And this is a true honor and
• 2:13:43
  pleasure for me to talk to you.
• 2:13:44
  And I, I, I do not exaggerate when I say,
• 2:13:47
  I believe you are a national treasure.
• 2:13:49
  I, I, I'm so glad that you came here,
• 2:13:51
  but, uh, I have to say
• 2:13:52
  that because you know what?
• 2:13:53
  Eric door is going to
• 2:13:54
  put me in the museum.
• 2:13:56
  Let's just stack him up here.
• 2:13:58
  Put you behind Plexiglas.
• 2:13:59
  Eric door is also here.
• 2:14:01
  And I don't want to say goodbye to
• 2:14:03
  everybody without
• 2:14:03
  acknowledging Eric, Eric, go ahead.
• 2:14:05
  Sit, sit in front of
• 2:14:06
  that mic there real quick.
• 2:14:07
  Let us know.
• 2:14:08
  So captain die, uh, alluded to before the
• 2:14:11
  fact that he is on your board.
• 2:14:14
  That is correct.
• 2:14:15
  And we're really honored and
• 2:14:18
  happy to have him on board.
• 2:14:19
  And, um, he's already, uh, giving me
• 2:14:22
  orders and motivating me.
• 2:14:24
  And I greatly appreciate that because
• 2:14:27
  we're a little bit behind schedule.
• 2:14:29
  So I, I needed to, um, have someone, uh,
• 2:14:34
  light me up and that's what he's doing.
• 2:14:35
  Maybe he needs to put the board through a
• 2:14:37
  boot camp so you guys can snap.
• 2:14:39
  Hey, that's a great idea.
• 2:14:40
  Uh, please let me document that.
• 2:14:44
  Well, Eric, uh, again, you are once
• 2:14:46
  again, my hero for the umpteenth time
• 2:14:49
  for, for doing this.
• 2:14:50
  I really appreciate it.
• 2:14:51
  Well, thanks man.
• 2:14:52
  No, thank you.
• 2:14:53
  You're very welcome for that compliment,
• 2:14:55
  but thank you very much.
• 2:14:56
  Cause I, I love this.
• 2:14:57
  This was fantastic.
• 2:14:58
  Thank you so much.
• 2:14:59
  Both of you guys.
• 2:15:00
  Sure.
• 2:15:00
  And thank you all for watching.
• 2:15:01
  Yep.
• 2:15:02
  Thanks guys.
• 2:15:04
  All right.
• 2:15:05
  That was a good interview.
• 2:15:06
  Now let's get to the meat.
• 2:15:08
  I'm sorry.
• 2:15:09
  I got to go.
• 2:15:09
  I'm running out.
• 2:15:10
  We're not a stuff.
• 2:15:11
  I appreciate it so much.
• 2:15:13
  Thank you so much for coming.
• 2:15:16
  Captain sir, if I may get you to sign, Oh
• 2:15:20
  my gosh, his hands gonna fall.
• 2:15:21
  I'm so sorry.
• 2:15:22
  It's the last one.
• 2:15:24
  Let me get away here.
• 2:15:26
  Did you go outside and see
• 2:15:30
  Bob Smith's right as my name.
• 2:15:32
  I hope you enjoyed that amazing interview
• 2:15:36
  with captain Dale Dye.
• 2:15:37
  If you want to help the Gettysburg museum
• 2:15:40
  of history expand, you can either go to
• 2:15:42
  our website, buy some military antiques,
• 2:15:45
  or if you go to the website, there's a
• 2:15:47
  section there that says foundation and
• 2:15:49
  you can donate to the Gettysburg museum
• 2:15:51
  of history foundation.
• 2:15:53
  And there's a link there that you can
• 2:15:54
  directly donate, or you can always send
• 2:15:58
  in a check and that would be payable to
• 2:16:01
  the Gettysburg museum
• 2:16:02
  of history foundation.
• 2:16:04
  That'll go directly to our
• 2:16:05
  building and development fund.
• 2:16:08
  Thanks again.
• 2:16:09
  Have a great night.