Oliver Stone has already made three movies on the Vietnam war starting in 1986 with "Platoon." According to Time he is back in Vietnam getting ready to film "Pinkville," a movie about the My Lai massacre.
According to Variety, Bruce Willis will be starring as General William Peers who led the Army investigation of the incident which resulted in the Peers report.
Time reporter Kay Johnson interviewed Stone in Danang. She asked him why he was making this movie now. Here is his response:
"Why now? Because of Iraq. That's a major reason. I had no intention of making a fourth Vietnam movie at all. But this last year — you know my feelings about the Iraq war of course — I think the time has unfortunately come back around to remember events like My Lai.
Why My Lai? Because it's a great story. I was [serving] in Vietnam at the time, and it really made an impression, and I think it changed the course of the war to a large degree. Americans were shocked, as well as the Vietnamese. You have to take into account that many Vietnamese villagers were neutral. It turned many neutral villagers against us. It was an interesting turning point."
Johnson also asked Stone if being a Vietnam veteran made it easier to understand what led to the My Lai incident. Stone's answer astutely shifts the question from the responsibility of the individual soldiers involved to the bigger question of the war policy that created the situation:
"Not easy, but I can understand it. I mean, you saw a bit of it in Platoon. Not on this scale. But that's part of what the movie shows, visualizes, dramatizes — the peer pressure, the tension. [My Lai] happened. It's a fact. It's history. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier. There was a breakdown in that division and there was a breakdown from the top. And I think it had a lot to do with the war policy, which was basically body counts, kill ratios, search and destroy, free-fire zones — these concepts, when they are allowed to grow, grow out of hand. And they got out of hand in many cases. My Lai is one of them."
Kay Johnson got Stone's reaction to President Bush's Kansas City speech in which he compared the results of pulling out of Vietnam to what would happen if we left Iraq. Stone has little patience with Bush:
"Now that's despicable. The man went to Yale, but he never went to class. Obviously he didn't learn history. Anyone who knows anything about Vietnam would know that it was not the American withdrawal that precipitated chaos in this area. It was quite the opposite. It was the American invasion that precipitated the chaos. I don't think he was a good student. I was in the same class with him at Yale — '68. I left, he stayed. But he didn't learn his lessons."
Did the American withdrawal precipitate chaos as the Bush administration claims? Or was it "the American invasion that precipitated the chaos"? What are the facts?