Why Oliver Stone Fought in Vietnam

The J.Rogan Experience. Well, it was a masterpiece. And is that your finest moment and your proudest moment you feel like as a filmmaker? Well, it's one of the highlights of my life. And it's the climax of this book, the 10 chapters here lead up to that because my story starts in 1976. I'm in New York. I'm broke, depressed, written 12 screenplays. Nothing's happened. I've come close a few times. Nothing's going on. And my marriage has ended. My first marriage. And it looks, I haven't accomplished in my life the things that matter. So at the age of 30, you kind of wake up. You say, you know, what can I do? My grandmother dies. I talk to her. I go and talk to her on her death bed. She's dead. But in France, they let them, my mother was French, she said. They lay them out. And I was talking to her. And I think it's a very moving scene where he communicates with her because she loved them. And his own family life was quite disturbing in many ways. It was for him a traumatic divorce between his mother and father. And he goes into this, what happened in, it's about a family too. It's about how a family life can break apart. You can become a child of divorce. So his life kind of falls apart. And he goes up, you know, hence he goes to Vietnam as a teacher. He goes to join some merchant marine. There's all kinds of things that happen. Comes back to school, goes back to Yale University, drops out again, writes a book, writes his first book about his experiences. I did this before back in 1966. I was 19 years old. Didn't work out. It was rejected. It was ultimately published about 1997. It's called A Child's Night Dream. So I was a writer from the beginning. I think before I was a director. And when that was rejected, I just said, fuck it. You know, I'm too full of myself. I'm too much of a narcissist. You know, I can't write about myself. So I joined the army and volunteered for combat and for Vietnam. I didn't want to miss it. You know, I wanted to see it right away. For the experience? No, I wanted to get to the bottom of the barrel. I wanted to see what this country was about. You know, I was inquisitive. I wanted to know what life was about. I mean, I'd grown up relatively sheltered, you know. I went to my father, made a living on Wall Street. He was a Republican. Eisenhower supporter. He was a lieutenant colonel in World War II, where he met my mother. I mean, he was a strong Republican. And all his life, I grew up in that ethic. And it really, it's something that when I went to Vietnam, he had never been in combat. But when I saw what I saw over there coming from a sheltered existence relatively, it was shattered. The glass was shattered. It was just, I wasn't like, I couldn't take my father's word for it anymore, anything. So I had to learn for myself. That's why. What was different from your father's perceptions of what it was like for him? He supported the war like many people did for several years until he got older. And then he came around one day and he said, you know, I think you're right. I think it's a futile thing because the whole idea of the Cold War, he began to question it at the age of 70, about 65. He said, you know, what difference does it make? This domino bullshit. He said, you know, the Russians have a sub off Long Island. You know, they can nuke us from anywhere. It doesn't make sense to play this zero sum game of fighting for land, fighting for one country or another, intervening in other countries. He began to question everything. And I was too. I didn't change. I know you're going to go to later in my life, but basically I didn't change until I went to this trip in Honduras, which I just told you about with my friend Richard Boyle for Salvador in 1985. I went down there and what I saw in Central America confirmed that we were doing it again. We were going into these countries. We didn't know what the fuck they were about. We didn't. And we were fighting these in most cases, the interests of most of the people, the majority of the people. They had had a revolution in Nicaragua because it was so corrupt. It was a revolution in 1979. And we've been opposed to that new regime ever since. So when you first when you entered into the army, when you signed up, did you did you have clarity about this? Did you when you just have this idea in your head that you needed to find out what it was like? No, no, I had no clarity. I was I wanted to get out of New York. I want to get away from my the whole. My parents were divorced. My father, I want to get away from my father. I want to get away from everything I knew. I didn't I didn't like Yale University. I was in the class with George Bush. You know, I come from that generation of Donald Trump, George Bush, Bill Clinton. Yeah, same generation. But I don't identify with those people because maybe they they didn't have that sense of service at all. I did. I had a sense of patriotism about that. But I think call it I really think it was misplaced. But I felt that I owe my country something. I can't work just for myself.