Bill Moyers Journal had a riveting interview with Oliver Stone last night....this was on PBS and here's an excerpt...
BILL MOYERS: Let's talk first about the President's decision. The President went to some length Tuesday night to say that Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But are there some lessons from your own experience in Vietnam that the President should be aware of?
OLIVER STONE: You cannot win the hearts and minds of people if you invade their country with soldiers. Invade them with schools, with help and the basic security required, but do not invade them with grunts, who don't know anything about the local customs. The moment you send these patrols, as we did in Iraq, into villages, you offend the people. Wherever I've been in the world, I've traveled extensively. The Vietnamese wanted us out. The Afghans are happy to take our money. They know the Americans are coming. This means money. Everybody can cut a deal with the Americans. Even the Taliban can be paid by the Americans. We --
BILL MOYERS: Well that, apparently, is what the-- Washington hopes that we might be able to as with the purchasing-
OLIVER STONE: To buy it off.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, to buy it off, as we did in Iraq.
OLIVER STONE: Well, the people were--
BILL MOYERS: Not inconceivable.
OLIVER STONE: Well, you-- we can buy our way through this? No. At the end of the day, they'll take the money, but they'll go their own way. They're fiercely independent as were the Vietnamese, by the way. I always thought of the Vietnamese as warrior ants. They never gave up. I don't know if you remember the slaughter they went through. We killed so many of them. But they kept coming. They never gave up because they were fierce and nationalistic. We're running the risk of alienating the nationalism of the Pashtun peoples, which is an extensive tribe in that area of Afghanistan. And they will now be offended enough to really link up with the nutcases of the Taliban. So that these two groups will come together. So, we will now be fighting a real war. And this will be out of our control. This will be the end. We will be sucked into a massive, massive war. Where we'll be bombing extensively again like in Vietnam.
BILL MOYERS: Why do you think he is doing this when he had so much public support for not doing it?
OLIVER STONE: This is a key question. And I think many people are asking themselves that today. Why? He was the reform candidate, the agent of change. And here he's pursuing Bush III policy. I am shocked by that. I thought that he had-- I know that he's an intelligent man. I know that-- and many smart Americans are saying, "I know he knows something I don't know." But I heard that argument all the way back to Vietnam, you know? I said, "Well, we must be going into Iraq," George Bush Senior, "Because they know something I don't know." Well, I don't believe that anymore. I really don't. I'm past that stage of my life. Iraq Two, we know that they lied to us. We know that the government is quite capable of manipulating intelligence. And who knows, in this case, what Obama is actually getting from his intelligence sources. Some of the intelligence people are against the move.
BILL MOYERS: So what wiggle room did he have? I mean, you and I both know that if there were another attack on America, not from Pakistan, necessarily, but from Afghan soil, Obama would be finished and so would his party. What wiggle room did he have, given the fact, as you just said, his options were framed by the Bush/Cheney years?
OLIVER STONE: Well, from Afghanistan, you mean from the caves between-- really it's Pashtunistan, which would be the area-- the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
BILL MOYERS: That's right.
OLIVER STONE: That's where you're suggesting-- the attack may have been planned there, but it was really planned by Sheikh Mohammed all over the world. He planned it in Berlin, in Hamburg. He planned it in America. They're in America- the terrorist- terrorism is a disease, it can happen like cancer, like drugs. It comes from everywhere. It can come from our cities. So, we don't-- it doesn't have to be originating in Afghanistan. I don't believe that it will. I think that-- Al Qaeda is only 100 people there left in those borders, in those caves, according to James Jones. On October, he made a statement in CNN.
BILL MOYERS: That's the President's National Security Advisor - right.
OLIVER STONE: National Security Advisor. There's 100 Al Qaeda left, at best. They could not mount any serious attack. But what they do have is influence. And influence is mighty. So, all the Muslim young people that are coming all over in Canada- in America, they're the ones who may do something. And if we send 30,000 American kids, grunts, who are not special troops at all, over there into their homeland. Like we did in Saudi Arabia before Iraq One. And like we did in Iraq Two, when we went into Baghdad, we are going to alienate those people. We are going to influence- I mean, give- we're giving a gift, a gift to Al Qaeda's and influence will expand beyond what they really can do.
BILL MOYERS: But would you give him the benefit of the doubt on this? Perhaps he did decide that this was the thing to do. That if he went in quickly, with a lot of force, he could- might bring it to an early end. Is it conceivable to you that Obama would have said I didn't-- You know, he did not campaign on getting out of Afghanistan. He campaigned on taking it seriously. So, maybe he said, "This is the best way to bring it to bring it to a quick end, a war I didn't start."
OLIVER STONE: Well, he may very well believe that. But I like Obama, but I think this is the tragic mistake. This is in a deeper way than just 30,000 men because it's not going to be 30,000 men. It's a shadow army. It's-- we're talking a contracting contractors alone in Vietnam is was six soldiers to every contractor. So, contractors are-- get a free ride here. They're war profiteers. So, if we're going to go up to 100,000 troops, we know that there's probably going to be another 30,000 contractors going in, maybe more. I mean, I don't know how we can afford all this. It's going to be $50 billion a year now. But it's going to go up to $100 billion a year now this war in Afghanistan. How is he going to pay for that?
BILL MOYERS: A million dollars a soldier.---
OLIVER STONE: What about contractors and what we pay them? And what are we paying the Taliban and - what about the CIA funds and the predator missiles that cost so much money? And all this?
BILL MOYERS: Well, how do you explain - I know a lot of people this week truly wrestling with this, asking the very question you're asking.
OLIVER STONE: Where is the money going to come from? How is our so-called empire going to-- it is an empire. How is that empire going to continue?
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean empire?
OLIVER STONE: We have an empire. We have soldiers in 120 nations all around the world. We have bases north of Afghanistan as you know-- it changes monthly. But Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, Turkmenistan. All these names. We have rings around Soviet Russia, practically. We've built in Latvia. We put NATO back in America has grown huge since the-- especially since the end of the Cold War. We expanded into the East. NATO was never supposed to go East. Do you remember that? NATO was for Western Europe. It was never supposed to go East. Clinton took it to Poland, to Czechoslovakia. Hungary. Bush expanded it. The Russians have a beef with us. And you know, rightly so. We became very big after l989. Bigger than we were. And now we're going to pay the price. The decision by Obama, although it seems minor, 30,000 men. I think it's major. I think this is very ominous. And I don't know that this time, because coming off the recession of where we are now. It doesn't make sense. It's like piling bricks on a donkey. You pile them so high, the donkey is going to collapse.
BILL MOYERS: What would you have said to the President before he made his decision if you could have talked to him?
OLIVER STONE: Don't sell out, man. I mean, the generals got you. You get into the presidency, and I think it's a trap. I would imagine you would know from Lyndon Johnson's experience. And he himself is on his tapes, was talking about the need to win in Vietnam. He-- although in his bones, I think that Lyndon Johnson knew he could not win there. Billions of dollars were spent in Vietnam. Huge waste of money and people got rich off the war. They always do. I always-- when I think of war, I think of money and patriotism. And Obama went out of his way to say that-- to read Vietnam into this was false history. I disagree completely, we always heard the story that the Vietnamese, if we didn't stop them in Vietnam, the dominoes would fall. Thailand would be next. Malaysia and so forth. And they would come, communism would come to the shores of California. And we hear it again and again.
BILL MOYERS: But it is also a fact that Afghanistan is where much of the attack was planned on 9/11. That did change the reality. Don't you think?
OLIVER STONE: No Afghanistan is just like Texas. It's just endless scrub. I don't think it means much. I think Pakistan is where the ballgame is. Afghanistan-- is ridiculous to go to war there. It's like a wasteland. I mean, the people are fighters. These people have been-- they resisted the British, the Russians. They-- I've often felt we are paralleling the Soviet Union. We fought the Soviet Union so hard from l945 on. And when they finally crumbled in 1991, it seems that our fate will follow the same course. I don't know why, it felt like we're locked. If your enemy dies, you may go on for a few years, but somehow we have the same sickness. There's no way people from the mainland of America can go over there and not intrude on these people. Just the fact to even walk into a village with our uniforms and our guns is an intrusion on their way of life. And it's an offense. The way we- if a soldier looks at a woman in a certain way, you know, they take offense. The-- the mentality is quite different than ours. We don't- it's another culture completely. And I don't understand why Obama, who knows about culture and he has an Indonesian background, too, I don't under- I'm shocked that he could look to force. No good will come of using force in a foreign land.
BILL MOYERS: You make me think of that opening scene in "Platoon." One of the more memorable moments in American movie making in my book. When the fresh Americans like yourself arrive in Vietnam. And for the first time, on that tarmac, they see those body bags.
OLIVER STONE: Innocence abroad you'll say, yes.
MALE VOICE 1: Ah man, is that what I think it is?
MALE VOICE 2: Alright...
BILL MOYERS: I know it's been a long time. But what would you say to those new troops going to Afghanistan about combat, based on your experience?
OLIVER STONE: I don't think it's going to be a happy experience for them. They will-- these are young men who are going to age fast. They're going to find themselves unwanted, un-liked. People who smile at you. You're never going to believe that they really like you. You don't know if they're going to stab you in the back or put a roadside bomb in your-- on the road, when you go out. Information-- you know, as you remember, the Vietnamese people were friendly, but dangerous. We didn't know who was who. They would come and work for us in the base camps that we built. These huge Las Vegases where we had P.X.'s. We were selling cars and TVs, often illegally. They would make their- these products would make their way into the hands of the Viet Cong in-- and NVA. A lot of our stuff ended up on the wrong side of the fence. Same thing is true here.
BILL MOYERS: What can you say about the chaos of war? How does it manifest itself? How did- and how does the brain adjust to that chaos? Or can it adjust to it?
OLIVER STONE: It multiplies. Violence begets violence. It just gets worse. The bombs go off. Innocent people get killed by accident. Mistakes happen. Take friendly fire. You remember friendly fire in Vietnam. I think 20 percent of our casualties were killed by ourselves because mistakes happen.
BILL MOYERS: There's a scene from "Born on the 4th of July" that's hard to take and impossible to forget. It's about friendly fire. The unintentional killing of your own comrades.
RON KOVIC: What happened?
BILL MOYERS: Were you ever involved in that?
OLIVER STONE: Oh, sure. It happened all the time. It was very dangerous in combat, 'cause you don't know where it's coming from. Sometimes it would be the guy behind you would lose it and fire off. The guy who was killed in Afghanistan, Pat Tillman, great guy, apparently. But he was killed by accident. By his own troops. That happens a lot in war. But the damage is collateral. It goes back not only into the dead, who come back. It goes through that generation, families. They come back to the States. The kids are affected, the wife, the parents. Then you have the people who come back with wounds, which are even worse in some cases. The concussions from Iraq. The brain damage. Far worse. They're saving more people on the battlefield now than they did in Vietnam. And as a result, you have more damaged people.
BILL MOYERS: What about the fear? Were you afraid there?
OLIVER STONE: At times, yeah. Absolutely. It was-- especially in the beginning. Frankly, I was trained well, but not particularly well. And we got there. When you first see combat, it's like pro-football. It goes much faster than you think and more awkwardly than you think. And it's not particularly grand or anything. And you try to save your life. And you see death. And you get used to it. And after a few engagements you get better at it. You learn--
BILL MOYERS: Better at it?
OLIVER STONE: You get better at it.
BILL MOYERS: Does the fear become blurred or numb as you do? Like patrolling in the--
OLIVER STONE: You crystallize the fear. You have to lose the fear. You have to get past it because otherwise you're going to freeze up.
BILL MOYERS: So, how do you get past it?
OLIVER STONE: Sometimes, for example, you get angry. And that's not a good emotion, either. But you get awfully, as I said, pissed off. And you know in Vietnam, we had the issue of less control. But there was a lot of racism, as there is in I think as there is in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of soldiers lost their ability to differentiate between the villagers and the enemy. The idea of killing innocence.
SOLDIER: Cease fire! Cease fire you [no audio] hole! What the [no audio] are you doing? [No audio] Damn it, I want to know what happened.
SOLDIER 2: I don't know sir. Possible accidental discharge.
SOLDIER: Have five men get in there, and tell me how many you got?
GROUP OF SOLDIERS: Foley! Foley! There! Check it out! Get 'em out!
RON KOVIC: Oh my God. We didn't do this did we? Oh my God! Jesus Christ.
OLIVER STONE: That's also going on in Afghanistan. There was a wedding party of 50 people was attacked by a predator drone. I mean, we've set off bad hostility towards America among all those people. And these are tribal people. They have big families. So, we probably pissed of 1,500 people.
Yeah, that ferocity, that fear, it goes on. People kill babies by accident. They kill families. It's happening now. It's the nature of war. We cannot operate in a foreign country. We intervene. Once we intervene, America has this blocky reputation. I mean, it just cannot be done by our servicemen.
BILL MOYERS: What was it like to kill?
OLIVER STONE: Frankly, you get numbed out. I mean, you reach a place of desensitization. You shoot without thinking. And you shoot because it's an instinct.
BILL MOYERS: Do you know who you're shooting at?
OLIVER STONE: Well, I was killing sol-- we were killing enemy. We were actually in conflict with the NVA in the jungle. But when we were in the villages, it was much more difficult. But I certainly saw American soldiers abuse villagers. Hit them, torture them, in some cases rape them, burn down their hooches. I mean, we treated them badly.
BILL MOYERS: How about you? How did you come to terms with what happened to you? And what did happen to you there?
OLIVER STONE: A lot of things happened. I mean, the priests were there blessing us. And would bless us before we went out in the field. And basically tell us that God was on our side against the North Vietnamese. We went into situations that were-- let me just say that I came back desensitized, another person. Speaking another language. Thinking another way. Not believing in anything I saw in Vietnam. From the officer class down. They were badly mismanaged. Badly fought war. Tremendous waste of resources and money. I never saw an intelligent approach to the war, which I think could have been done. But it was never achieved. There were some very good officers. They were World War II material. These guys had been through a real thing in Korea. And you would trust them and also our Master Sergeants. We were working with 40, 50-year-old Master Sergeants. And we looked up to them. But in reality, they didn't know what they were doing in this jungle. They had no idea. They were arrogant. They had come from World War II, and they thought that they could beat the Vietnamese. They didn't take it seriously. And we also had the attitude of heavy fire. Soon as you get opposition, you bring in heavy artillery. You even bring in planes and bombs, if necessary. And you just bomb the hell out of the place. Then you move forward again. You can't win a war that way. You have to win that kind of a war-- if you're going to go guerilla, you have to go guerilla to guerilla. You have to go in with what we're doing, to some degree, in Afghanistan, but it won't work. But, you know, with special forces, specially trained soldiers. Joint, what they call JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command which is where McChrystal comes from there. It's a dirty war, McChrystal fought in Iraq...
More of the interview is available here:
pbs.org
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