Oliver Stone: Inside/Out (1992)
"Our hearts were broken because it was awful, that war. He wrote me a story that he never mentioned it, on any interview, but I'm going to tell you. The awful thing about Vietnam was the marécage [swamp], you know, the water bed. They were up to the waist in water and leeches would come and climb…they had to tie up their penis [so] that the leeches didn't go inside to their intestine. That's what he write me! So [you ask] 'what do you feel?' How do I feel? It was awful." -Jacqueline Stone, mother (a non-native English speaker)
Absolutely incredible find on YouTube, the 1992 documentary on Oliver Stone originally made for Showtime here in the States and which aired on the BBC's Arena show in the UK:
It's very telling that Oliver's recounting of his combat experience is limited to basically one funny anecdote, and it's a fellow solider and his mother who recount the horrors:
"Oliver and his platoon saved our lives one day. We'd walked right into the middle of a U shaped ambush. We all thought we were going to die. We thought they were going to come out of their bunkers with their .45s and finish us off when it got dark. I had one bullet left - our whole unit had one bullet left - and I shot it into the air, and that was the signal for Second Platoon to come up. They had been out of the fire - out of harm's way to this point - and Oliver came running up. I said, 'You guys be careful, they're all over the place out there. We've lost a lot of men. There's guys dying out there.' He said, 'Don't worry about it, we'll go get 'em.' And they jumped over the anthills and they went up there to get the Viet Cong [and] NVA. There was a lot of shooting going on, hand grenades, and I was afraid all of them had gotten killed. Then they came crawling back, and Oliver had been wounded. I think all of them had been wounded. But they had done their best to save us, and I credit him with saving my life. There are survivors of our platoon that day [because of it]." -Larry Robinson, 25th Infantry Division
"He wrote me [that] he save the life of this platoon….I said, 'How can you do such a thing? How can you kill somebody?' You know, I could not even think. When you're the mother, you see your son as…how could he have killed another person, you know?" -Jacqueline Stone
