Chasing The Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game

No greater satisfaction exists now than a paragraph well written in honor of something you value.

Such power, so much death in one place at one time. Never to be forgotten.

Destiny is never clear when it arrives. Sometimes we just refuse to do what we no longer feel good about doing. These moments are mysteries in our lives, but we know everything will change.

Empathy is born from understanding,

offload some 125,000 dissidents out of the Mariel harbor on boats to Miami. Among the people were concealed some 2,500 “criminals” and “deviants

Viet Cong, young men carelessly eating their breakfast, never suspecting the Americans would be out so early. They paid with their lives. Most of us were pretty excited whenever we actually, but rarely, saw the enemy, much less killed them. But Barnes was cool, so cool, no big displays ever. Having reported the incident, and stripping the dead men, he soon had us under way, no credit taken, looking for further action ahead; considering there had already been contact, the likelihood of more that day was in the air. Whereas some of us were not looking forward to such an encounter, the thought excited Barnes. He was a great soldier, probably on his second or third tour — but why? Why would he come back after a facial wound like he had? I never asked, and he never told. You hear things in the army, as in all society, and some kind of narrative emerges; in this case, the story was that he’d been literally shot or sustained shrapnel in the face, skull, head, requiring a major reconstruction job as the scar branched deeply around his eye, nose, and cheek; even his lips were affected. And as he had clearly once been a handsome man, the scars perversely heightened his visage into a Phantom of the Opera echo — a man distorted, perhaps, by anger or revenge, or really a question mark. What was he about? He never hinted in all the time I was around him. I watched him with both curiosity and trepidation; he’d get back to the rear after we’d been out in the field a week or more and relax with booze, poker, cigarettes, sometimes a cigar. It was said he’d been in Japan in the hospital about eight months, rehabbing from the wound. And there he’d “married a Japanese gal.” And now he was back. Sort of an Ahab looking for his White Whale. And here I was, like Ishmael, walking five or ten steps behind him, always expecting that something was going to break because, like a fly, he smelled the blood of war. As good a soldier as he was, I was relieved when he got rid of me as his radio operator.

I was heartbroken, but used to it; the patterns of struggle and failure in life tend to repeat themselves.

You transcend your own self through acting out someone else's life.

No person should ever have to witness so much death,

Without a moral center -- there can be no string family. And without family, we one and all suffer.