 were…we’d split between jungle and village. We would go into the villages, yeah, we would investigate for arms and rice supplies, everything. We had to know what was going on. And we’d find things. And sometimes we wouldn’t find things, which would lead to frustration. Sometimes you’re losing men in the jungle to mines, booby traps, this, that.  I saw a few incidents that were pretty raw, and I talk about that in the book. And I talk about myself almost crossing the line. I didn’t cross the line, but I almost did, because you could get really upset.
By example—and we didn’t know about it then—but the My Lai Massacre in March of ‘68 is all about that. In fact, when you get into the My Lai Massacre—I tried to make a movie about it, but it fell apart because it was a tough subject for people. It was in My Lai, these…there were several platoons that went into a series of villages in that province, and they had bad information. The information came from the CIA, who had just tortured a few people, and they gave them faulty information telling them that they would be at such-and-such NVA (North Vietnamese regiment) in the villages that day near My Lai. And they went in thinking they were seeing the enemy. They weren’t. They were…not one enemy bullet was fired at the soldiers. Not one. That’s what the Army investigation revealed. The only…the Army investigated itself honestly, but then the report was, of course, smothered, and all the…the guy who led the report, General [William R.] Peers was…he’s a hero of mine, he tried to bust…he indicted 25 people, all the way to the top of the division. He indicted the general of the division. In fact, it goes beyond the division. It goes to the CIA guy who was providing information to the general.
  But that is…here you kill 500 plus civilians in cold blood in this village, and they were slaughtered in the most brutal way, when you get into the details. It’s…that’s the worst example I know, but it was going on on a small scale everywhere, I believe. Everywhere. People were knocking off Vietnamese. Jeez, because they were another race or whatever. They were, to many of us, they were “gooks.” They were not human beings. That happens. That’s the second lie.
 We were never winning the war. We thought maybe we were winning the war, but we were doing everything wrong in the briefing room, in our tactics, strategy, and in our reporting. I talk about [General William] Westmoreland coming out to our battle and taking the wrong conclusions from it. Three weeks later, we had the… [crosstalk] I’m sorry?
ANYA PARAMPIL: He was complaining about your haircuts.
OLIVER STONE: Yeah, well, I wasn’t there, but I heard that story, that our uniforms were not together, we’re not…we’re not bloused and all that. But we were not…we were a ragged-looking troop. We’d been in the field so long.
But the point was the strategists were not thinking about what the Vietnamese were really doing. They were worried about Khe Sanh, which was not…which was a red herring. They were really…the enemy was aiming for Saigon. They were going to cut the country at the capital, and they almost did. But the point was that we were lying about the whole war to the American people. We were inflating the body counts, inflating them enormously, and at one point in the war they were saying the Viet Cong, the NVA, are going to run out of people. They never did. As many as we were killing, of course, they would count civilians as NVA, all kinds of dirty tricks.
People were there at the upper classes to get promoted. Officers were in the field to get promoted. They’d go out when they had to. Some of the master sergeants too. It was…people knew that it was a paycheck. If you were an older, experienced soldier from World War II and Korea, you knew the score. You’d stay out of the field as much as possible but get your combat pay, get every extra bonus you can get, go to the PX. PX is a gold mine. It’s like Las Vegas. You can hit the jackpot. You buy stuff at the PX, you resell it. All kinds of games.
I mean, we were moving cars over there. We were doing…there was a tremendous amount of value we sent to Vietnam that disappeared. It went into the South Vietnamese Army pockets. It went into…eventually it ended up in this…in the NVA pockets, even our weaponry. It was an amazing racket, a huge racket.
You have to imagine a Las Vegas being sent to Vietnam, all that money, all those base camps, all those helicopters, five thousand of them got shot down, plus several…another two thousand, I believe, Vietnamese helicopters, South Vietnamese. So, we had Bell Helicopters making a fortune, Brown & Root is making a fortune building base camps. It was a racket from beginning to end. It was a lie. And to fight communism. Although as we know it wasn’t…it wasn’t communism that threatened our…it was an independence revolution fought by the Vietnamese for centuries against the French, and against the Chinese, too. They just didn’t want to be a colony anymore, and we could not get out of that mindset.
So those three lies are what I talked about, and that haunted me after the war. But it took me a time, it took me a while to come around to it. But they’re at the basis. I know how government’s official stories lie. And you have to think about that in terms of where we are now with the Iraq wars and the Afghani war. I mean, you saw the report, I think, in December of last year. The Afghani [Afghanistan] Papers came out. They were featured, actually, in The Washington Post. I couldn’t believe that! And it goes back, it traces all the misreporting that happened from Afghanistan, and the objectives and the timeline and the reality. We never faced the reality that we would never get out of there alive. It was a quagmire.
ANYA PARAMPIL: And then when it…right when it seems like it may end, a dubious story claiming that Russians are paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers surfaces, and any chance of withdrawal seems sabotaged, which I personally think was actually something President Trump did genuinely want to follow through on.
One entertaining moment in the book is when you discuss your acceptance speech for best screenwriting at the Golden Globes for Midnight Express. You use the moment to try and denounce the law-and-order era of Nixon and Hollywood’s complicity in promoting it. It wasn’t received well. You were actually…you talked about being booed off stage by your colleagues in attendance, but you add, quote, “Hollywood at that time was actually far less hysterical and more tolerant than what it’s become.” What did you mean by that? How has Hollywood changed since even that time?
OLIVER STONE: Well, first, there are two things in this issue. One, was I was an early bird on that, maybe too early. I hated the cop shows I was seeing. I turned them on, and they would always be the same theme: bad guys or drugs, sometimes more often he was black or Hispanic, but they get carted off to jail. The cops were the detectives, were doing their job. It was sold to us that drugs were bad, the drug war was necessary, on television constantly. They made money on it, a lot of money, all these shows, repetitive shows.
And I really…I was in the room at that night with the producers, and they were getting awards for making these shows. And I just thought it was hypocritical because it was easy to blame Turkey for their harsh drug laws, but we had forced Turkey into those laws because we had tried to interdict their poppy growth. It’s a whole dirty story; you can tie their poppy growth to Afghanistan, which is an amazing story, but that’s not the space for it here.
The drug war was corrupt from beginning to end. There was never an honesty about it. And. also, why did you have the drug war? Why is America lecturing other countries on how to do things and interfering in their affairs, when we…our problem is here. We’re the demand factor. We want the drugs, and the question comes up of legalization of drugs, too. These issues were in my head back then, and I was trying to kind of…unfortunately I hadn’t written the speech and I was loaded, I was drunk. I also had smoked…snorted some cocaine that night. It was a wild time in Hollywood in the late 70s, and I couldn’t get my tongue around my thoughts. So, I got up on stage, and I won this award for the screenplay of Midnight Express, and I screwed it up and I got booed off the stage. But I was a frustrated young man that way, because I wanted to get this stuff out and, like, the movie Midnight Express was being misunderstood by so many people, especially critics who were saying it was