THE GRUNTS’ WAR, TAKE 1

The tired men in dirty, sweat-stained Army fatigues sit in small groups at night around the hissing white lights of Coleman lanterns. They hold M-16 rifles, grenade launchers and scripts.

“OK, Tex, give me some real agony now,” Dale Dye tells one man who’ll soon become horribly wounded. There is a roar of make-believe agony. The next line, also roared, is from Tom Berenger:

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP AND TAKE IT--TAKE THE PAIN!”

Berenger later reads another bit of dialogue. Whereupon a colleague bellows, “Hey, that’s my freaking line, man! You take my freaking line, I’ll frag you!” All the guys crack up.

But then, this is the world’s only infantry training course with scene studies and character analysis.

Dye, running the course, doubles as sort of a combat Stanislavsky, coaching actors on the war in Vietnam that got him three Purple Hearts. He’s taking his 30 charges--actors and extras recruited from New York, Hollywood, Texas, Tennessee, and the Philippines--through 12 unique days of hard, no-slack field training.

The aim is to give them a taste of being grunts, Army infantrymen, before they start playing them in “The Platoon,” a new movie about the war not due for release until fall.

The film is not intended as “Rambo: First Blood, Part 25.” Nor is it supposed to be the cosmic guilt of past Vietnams created by what some call the Malibu National Guard, film-makers whose primary knowledge of the war came via Walter Cronkite and the “CBS Evening News.”

“Platoon” is about an infantry platoon, the fight between good and evil in that outfit, and what it was like to be a grunt in Vietnam--at least that part of it experienced by a husky, broad-shouldered man named Oliver Stone.

Stone knows that his most severe critics will be other veterans.

“A heavy responsibility,” he says. “If I screw it up, they’ll all know. The vets will all know. They’ll be disappointed once again in Hollywood. And that would be a shame.”

Stone, 39, whose explosive movie “Salvador” is about a more recent war in Central America, wrote and is directing “Platoon.” He is distinguished in two regards. He’s the only ex-grunt around with a Purple Heart and an Oscar.

He got the former in 1967 for wounds while in the 25th Infantry Division. The Oscar came in 1979 for his screenplay for “Midnight Express.” The night he accepted it at the Music Center, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were outside, picketing Best Picture Oscar winner, “The Deer Hunter,” Michael Cimino’s 1978 movie about Vietnam and its impact on the lives of a group of friends.

They called it racist, reactionary and fascist. That same night, Jane Fonda, who twice went to Hanoi to protest the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, won an Oscar for best actress as the Marine captain’s wife who falls in love with a paraplegic Vietnam vet (Jon Voight) in “Coming Home.”

A strange evening, but it was a strange war, one whose John Philip Sousa was Jimi Hendrix and which began each day with an Armed Forces Vietnam deejay in Saigon crying “Gooood mornnning, Vietnam.”

As Dye, a retired Marine captain, tells the men he’s training here: “Gentlemen, we fought an incredible war. It’s one reason a lot of us are about half a klick off.”

But he says it with a twinkle in his eye. And he grins at Stan White, 42, a fellow Marine grunt from Vietnam days helping him give the actors the talk, walk and look of the guys who did the fighting.

A partial roll call of Dye’s troops: first up, Chris, the FNG, or New Guy. He’s played by Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen, the tormented Army captain of “Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola’s mad, surreal Vietnam epic of 1978.

Although only 20, Charlie already has six films behind him, among them “Red Dawn,” “Lucas” and “The Boys Next Door.”

His soul-dead, combatwise platoon sergeant is Berenger, 35, whose dossier includes “The Big Chill,” “Rustler’s Rhapsody” and recently, CBS’ “Flesh and Blood.” Willem Dafoe, 30, (“To Live and Die in L.A.” and “Streets of Fire”) usually plays bad guys. Here, he’s essaying Sgt. Elias, a two-tour veteran and the platoon’s conscience.

The cast also includes Anthony Quinn’s son, Francesco, 23, as Rhah, a raspy-voiced loon who thinks he’s immortal. And Kevin Dillon, 20, as Bunny, a goofy, baby-faced human time bomb.

Last year, Dillon’s brother, Matt, played a young Marine in Broadway’s “The Boys of Winter.” That also was about Vietnam, but it wasn’t written by a veteran. It had lines like, “We all have little My Lais in the corners of our souls.” It bombed.

The play also had its own version of boot camp. But its actors went home each day. Not so those training for “Platoon.” They’ll be in the bush all the time. No hotel time, no hot showers, no calls home to mothers, wives, girlfriends or even agents.

Their field training schedule calls for them to sleep in two-man fighting holes, partake of two cold Army rations a day and learn of such things as klicks (kilometers), bloopers (M-79 grenade launchers), Claymore mines, M-60 machine guns, M-16 rifles and “rock ‘n’ roll” (firing on full automatic). They’ll set night ambushes and man LPs, or listening posts.

They’ll rappel down a 50-foot tower. And go on patrols, known as “humps.” And learn that with full gear and weapons, even a two-klick hump is a mother when hills and triple-canopy jungle lie ahead. With luck, they’ll get four or five hours of sleep a night.

The idea of this cram course, Stone says, is to immerse them in the Vietnam infantryman’s life, his way of thinking, talking and moving.

Then, he says, once the cameras roll, “subconsciously what will slip out is the dog-tired, don’t-give-a-damn attitude, the anger, the irritation, the casual way of brutality, the casual approach to death.

“These are all the assets--and liabilities--of infantrymen. . . . I remember being so damned tired that I wished Charlie”--short for Victor Charlie, or Viet Cong--”would come up and shoot me, get this thing over with.”

Stone’s script doesn’t have the massively surreal war of “Apocalypse Now” (a movie he likes) or the explosive, one-man revenge-and-rescue returns to Vietnam of such pure cinematic fighting machines as Sylvester Stallone and Col. Chuck Norris.

Instead, he’s written a grunt-level series of vignettes, seen through the eyes of the New Guy, about the day-to-day existence of a rifle platoon, with members of the platoon based on the men with whom Stone served.

The script depicts the camaraderie, compassion and often loopy humor of the grunt; the let’s-get-mellow brotherhood of pot-smoking; the brutality, terrifying violence and madness of combat, and the somehow-surviving bits of conscience and innate decency exemplified by Dafoe’s sergeant and young Sheen’s scared New Guy.

“I think it’s a truthful view of what happened to the infantry over there,” Stone says. “You can call it ‘left’ as opposed to ‘right’ in the sense that the right has glorified and fantasized the war”--he means Rambo & Co.--”and never dealt with the heavy toll the war took. Or the fact it may have been a mistake.

“This film certainly questions the political basis of the war.”

“Platoon” has a pittance-by-Hollywood-standards budget of $6 million. Stone has been trying to film it since 1976, when he wrote its first version. Although it drew favorable comment, he says, it still had “dozens of rejections . . . nobody wanted to make that movie because it was too hard. I was told it was too much of a downer.”

He finally got the money from a British company, Hemdale Film Corp. (the company that also backed “Salvador”). Orion Pictures agreed to distribute “Platoon” in the United States in October. He then signed up a cast and crew. But after all that, there was one more delay that almost unhinged him.

The delay was caused by the turbulent, fraud-riddled presidential election here in February that touched off a score of deaths, a revolution and the possibility of civil war. It would have been bad craziness to start filming the Vietnam War, then have real shooting erupt.

So the actors--most still were in the States--were told to hang loose and see how the revolution went. It went just fine. President Ferdinand Marcos fled on Feb. 25, Corazon Aquino took over, and most of the platoon flew in nine days later.

On the day they arrive, Stone is very relieved. A civil war probably meant shifting to Thailand, “losing actors and money. Considering how many times I’d come close to making the picture--well, one more time. . . .” He winces, then laughs.

That night, Dye, a tall, gregarious man of 41 with a remarkable gift of mimicry and 21 years in the Marines, holds a briefing on the pre-film training schedule.

In attendance: White, Dye’s chief aide, and three young “ringers”--Marine reservists Robert Galotti and Mark Ebenhoch, and a former reconnaissance Marine, Drew Clark, a tough, bawdy kid whom the actors soon affectionately nickname “Recon.”

The ringers are the USMC edition of the three Musketeers. They’re clannish, they do drink some, and they kid and cuss each other without mercy. Clark is particularly ferocious--at first glance. A vivid trio for actors like Kevin Eshelman, a “Platoon” Pfc.

“When we got here, we saw them having a beer,” the actor says later. “The guy who plays Tex started to sit down with them. One of them, it had to be Clark, says, ‘Hey, you don’t sit here. Marines sit here.’ That story got around real fast.”

But, Eshelman adds, things dramatically changed once in the field:

“They turned out to be the nicest bunch of guys you’d ever want to know. I probably couldn’t have gone through half this stuff without them.”

The trio work for Dye’s Warriors Inc., a company that advises war-movie makers. White, a homicide detective on vacation from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept., only will be around for the training cycle.

(The platoon is Army, but Dye can’t ignore his beloved Corps. He promotes White to the Marine rank of gunnery sergeant, makes him “the Gunny.”)

The ringers, assigned as squad members, will both help train the civilians and appear in the film, albeit in small roles. They and the real actors are required to stay in character throughout training, address Dye (who also plays a captain in the film) as “Sir,” and each other by their screen names and ranks. Oddly, all the actors readily comply, although a tad self-consciously at first.

“Don’t wind up taking over the squads,” Dye warns the ringers. “They’ll defer to you, but avoid that.” About the M-60: “Short bursts, two to three rounds. First Rambo you see, kick him right in the butt.”

He preaches safety, safety, safety. Blanks are being used, yes, but all know that blanks can kill or wound. Says Dye: “You’re permitted to go non-tactical (take charge) any time you see a safety violation or even the threat of one.”

Final thought: “You’ve got to remember, these guys are a draftee infantry platoon. They’re not like Marines.”

“Attitude problem,” Clark says.

The briefing, with beer included, takes two hours and occurs in Manila at the Manila Garden Hotel, briefly the headquarters for “Platoon.” The next day, the men in baggy fatigues and jungle boots assemble in the hotel lobby. My, do the civilians gape. Particularly when they see hulking Clark, his huge rucksack, and the wicked-looking knife taped upside down on one shoulder strap.

“What are you?” an American lady asks him.

The men move out for a two-hour ride to the field and training, squeezing themselves and their gear into a pair of buses, their destination what Dye calls “another time, another country, another era.”

The buses roar south, missing oncoming cars, trucks, motorbikes and humans by narrow margins. The sights whiz by. Hamlets with wood-shanty stalls full of small green bananas, mangoes, Pall Malls, Coca-Colas and rum. Bright-eyed kids waving and weary old men ambling. Paddy fields with water buffalos, treelines and clusters of palm groves.

Gunny White stares intently out of the window. “Checking out those treelines?” a friend asks. White just grins (later he admits, yeah, his mind went back to the war then, back to when a treeline usually meant Viet Cong and a really bad day).

The buses rumble up a dusty, rocky road, past a sign that says “NVA BUNKER” (a bunker complex to be manned in a key scene by two Filipino stunt men playing enemy soldiers), and then to a small, flat field. First formation, a ragged one, is held.

Dog tags and rifles are issued. Gear is issued and checked. There is meticulous attention to detail. The gear includes bayonets, bandage pouches, ponchos, poncho liners, flashlights with red filters for night use and four canteens per man.

There are none of those 30-round magazines seen in the M-16 rifles of other Vietnam movies (real grunts used 20-round mags). No chin straps dangling from helmets, Hollywood style, either; here, they’re clipped together in the rear of the helmet.

There even is a Unit One medical kit for Paul Sanchez, who plays Doc, the platoon’s tall, compassionate, soft-spoken medic. Doc also gets an M-16.

The cast is scattered around a small scrub-brush hill, one side of which features a 500-foot drop to a rocky stream bed. The hill is the Third Perimeter, scene of the movie’s climactic night attack by the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA.

The men are told to dig two-man foxholes, quickly. They dig furiously, their palms blistering and bleeding. Suddenly, just after sundown, BLAM! They’re puzzled. “Get down in that hole, get down!” the Gunny yells. They get down. Ah, only a simulated mortar round. There’s a pause. “All clear!” Dye shouts. Digging resumes, halted four more times by blasts or distant flares.

Dye later critiques the men, then issues their first field meal, the modern Army’s lightweight, plastic-wrapped MRE’s, or Meal, Ready-to-Eat Individual (canned Vietnam-era C-rations are in short supply and will be saved for actual filming.)

Mm-mm, bad, this chow--tasteless pre-cooked hamburgers, small cold hot dogs and . . . “bean component.”

After, er, dinner, Dye starts the first combat lesson. Tonight, he says, enemy movement is expected, so everyone is on 50% alert--two hours on, two off. In each foxhole, one man stays awake and on guard for two hours while the other sleeps. Then they trade off.

He gives the night’s halt-who-goes-there challenge and counter-sign-- Blue . . . Lagoon . Then he and White take four men a few hundred meters out past the edge of the night defensive position and set them up in two-man listening posts. He issues each man five rounds of blank ammunition.

One listening post is manned by Dafoe and Clark, the other by Sheen and Dillon (in time, Dillon’s new-won expertise in mock combat will be much admired by the ringers, though not his propensity for sleeping on watch).

At 2 a.m. Clark radios-in movement to his front. It’s Dye and the Gunny, hassling the lads. A flurry of blank-round shots ring out.

The LPs are brought in. Young Charlie sheepishly admits that, uh, he left his web gear behind. He and Dafoe are sent to fetch it. Just go 168 paces out and turn left. Surprise. They find it. And learn, like everyone else, how to be very tired.

At sunrise, actor Ivan Kane, 29, an irrepressible New Yorker, cheerfully admits the bush is not his bag: “I’ll deal with concrete any day of the week. Crickets scare the hell out of me.”

There also is what becomes the Gunny’s constant lament: “I’m too old for this. I must be out of my mind.” Yet he’s usually the first up at dawn.

The first full day in the bush starts with a class on M-16s and the dangers of blanks, then a class on squad radios and radio procedure.

Never say “Over and out,” Dye says as the actors take turns on plastic-wrapped handsets. It is Hollywood, it is wrong and it drives him nuts.

At noon, the platoon reboards buses for the one-hour trip to Camp Castaneda, their new home for the rest of the course. It’s a Philippine Constabulary training camp located 60 miles south of Manila.

The actors again dig two-man foxholes, this time with poncho-covered or plywood roofs. They camouflage them--well, sort of--with palm leaves and brush. They endure more blister agony, more red ants and learn much more about the life of a grunt.

They become increasingly dirty, and downright funky, although most try to shave and take sponge baths in their helmets. Their humor and language grows rougher with each day, with even quiet, reserved Charlie Sheen swearing with great force and frequency.

It’s a pretty safe bet that they’ll need two weeks of verbal de-tuning before they’re again fit for polite society.

Periodically, even during rest breaks on long marches, Dye holds class on scene studies and character analysis. At such times the troops also hear him talk about the war. About the funny things, like the rap of the short-timer, the grunt headed back to the World: “Man, I’m so short I been dangling my feet off a dime.”

And about the sad things, the wounding, the dying.

“When you get hit and you get morphine,” says Dye, who has experienced both, “the morphine hits you like a wet dream . . . it’s like a numbing warm coming up.”

“Contrary to what you see in the movies, death on the battlefield is not a dramatic thing,” he continues. Mortally wounded men, he says, die in two ways, one of which is “give-up-itis, where he turns white from his cheeks up.”

The man who fights death, Dye says, “well, he will die rather quickly . . . whereas the other guy will rather fade out.”

The mood grows somber. To lighten things up, he cracks a few jokes, does a fine LBJ imitation. Question, a good one, from one of the actors: Won’t civilians who see “Platoon” be puzzled by its gruntspeak, all that stuff about LPs, klicks, bloopers and LZs?

Dye’s swift reply: “A) It doesn’t matter. B) The script is constructed to cover that. And remember, gentlemen, there were 3.5 million guys who served in Vietnam, and they each got five bucks to see this movie.”

None of the actors have any military experience. But most prove quick studies. Gunny White is especially proud of Mark Moses, 25, a lanky New Yorker who plays the platoon’s ineffectual lieutenant. “A true butter-bar from the word go,” the Gunny says. “You give him a compass, he’ll get you lost in five minutes.”

Some, particularly Berenger and Dafoe, quickly acquire the mannerisms of the men they play. The easy-going Berenger, as a sergeant for whom combat and killing has become the only world, starts looking every bit the experienced field soldier, with his voice occasionally taking on a hard, harsh edge.

Dafoe, an intense, conscientious man cast as Berenger’s nemesis, evolves into Sgt. Elias--speaking slowly, thoughtfully, easing into his role as a decent, rational soldier in the most irrational of circumstances.

As part of their training, they’ve got to be sergeants as well as play them. Tricky business, this, says Dafoe, who grows more tired and drawn-looking each day: “Discipline’s a very touchy deal. And whether it’s the actor or the character (doing the discipline), you don’t like to queer the deal.”

Many have prepared extensively for their roles, read all the Vietnam books they could find. Berenger’s reading included “Brennan’s War,” a good, if little-known autobiography by an ex-grunt who served 39 months in Vietnam. He also discussed Stone’s script with Vietnam vets, mostly Marines or former Marines near his home in South Carolina.

“They’d say things like, ‘Yeah, that would have happened.’ But it always came down to things like, ‘Well, I don’t know, I was up in I Corps, Khe Sanh. . . .’ ”

(Stone’s film is set in the woods and triple-canopy jungle northwest of Saigon, near the Cambodian border.)

Tony Todd, 31, a tall black actor from New York, is a veteran of two wars on stage--David Rabe’s Vietnam-era “Streamers” and Dalton Trumbo’s corrosive anti-war classic of World War I, “Johnny Got His Gun.” To act in “Platoon,” he passed on a new Vietnam play, “Wasted.”

He didn’t think much about the war when it was going on, was just a high school kid who loved to party: “But when I’d go home, there was Walter Cronkite saying . . . well, it got to the point where it’d just be a drone of casualties, casualties, casualties.

“I don’t know,” he says softly. “In one way I regret I didn’t get there. Maybe I should have enlisted, or done something. That’s a guilt I’ll probably carry for a while. Because I know at least three guys who died there.”

Few doubt that these Method infantry acting classes will add insight and reality to their roles. One dissenter: Quinn, who says he has attended outdoors survival schools in Upstate New York where civilians play at war. He doesn’t think the training will show.

The majority opinion is best expressed by John C. McGinley, 26, a funny, fast-talking New Yorker who left Joseph Papp’s version of “Hamlet” and a soap opera to live in a foxhole, get dirty and tired and be a squad leader.

Sure, he says, he could just go out, don uniform and makeup, and emote: “But it wouldn’t be as good. Because this helps inform you about the characters. Like, O’Neill (his character) hates all this.” A quick grin. “And now I know why.”

All this includes the Gunny’s short PT sessions at dawn, mild at first but later offering “the Stomp,” a brutally fast run in place, and two-man wrestling matches. One such bout provokes young Dillon to note: “Obviously these guys slept last night.”

Sure, it gets a laugh. Not so “the Punch,” wherein the actors briskly pummel each other in the gut, in many cases causing quarter-sized bruises around the midriff. But no one even mutters, “But I’m an actor. . . .” The harshest thing heard is, “This is the last time I do a non-union picture.”

The sentiment is understandable, particularly when the full-gear patrols, the humps, increase in length and lead to a 12-klick, uphill-downhill monster. Sheen, returning from a lesser hump in sweat-stained exhaustion, best sums it as he croaks: “Water.”

On this march, Clark, the recon Marine, becomes a casualty. He slips on tall rocks, falls and something in his knee pops. He curses in pain and disgust. He is taken to Manila, where his knee is examined by a young doctor summoned on short notice. The diagnosis: only a bad sprain, not torn ligaments, as Clark feared. His leg is tightly bandaged. The next night, he’s driven back to camp.

Loud cheers and yelps greet him as he swagger-limps in and loudly announces, truthfully, that his knee was examined by . . . a gynecologist.

As the laughter dies down, Dye tells the men, “OK, let’s go to Page 9, Scene 14, exterior platoon CP at night.” The grunts leaf through their scripts and become actors again.

Few know until the last day that they’ll go directly from camp to cameras without a chance to take a shower or relearn the pleasure of a soft bed. Perchance this is kept secret to avoid desertions or a revolt?

“Ah, no,” Dye says, deadpan. “I intentionally didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to distract them.”

The course concludes with a night action, observed by Dye, the Gunny and Stone, but run only by the platoon’s leaders. It includes an ambush featuring what is known as a “Daisy-chain” mine blast. It proves an exercise in both confusion and new-won competence.

Dawn brings Graduation Day, with awards for worst and best grunts, followed by a beer bust that night. And then . . . out before dawn the next day to start the first day of filming in a rain forest. (The filming ended Tuesday, eight weeks and two days after it began.)

That no one quits during the training is due to various reasons--the challenge, peer pressure, and above all, the desire to be in Stone’s movie. But it’s also due in large part to Dye and White, master psychologists if ever.

They take the guys to the edge but not over. Most important, they keep the humor going.

“Platoon” is part of a New Wave in Vietnam films that have been made or will be filmed this year: it’s one of four written or co-written by Vietnam veterans.

The others are “Hamburger Hill” by James Carabatsos; the very-low-budget “84-Charlie Mopic” by Patrick Duncan, and “Full Metal Jacket,” which recently finished filming in England.

The last is a Stanley Kubrick project based on “The Short-Timers,” a novel by Gustav Hasford, a former Marine. Hasford says he contributed to the script and is sharing screen credit for it with Kubrick and Michael Herr.

Judging from interviews with actors in Stone’s film, the misery they’ve endured has given them a lot of new-found appreciation for the American grunts of Vietnam.

“It gives you such a totally different way of looking at them,” says Johnny Depp, 22, the film’s Spec. 4 Lerner. “Before, you’d read books, read ‘We humped the boonies and we sweated,’ and you’d say, ‘Honest to God, it must’ve been hard.’

“But when you actually do it, with your ruck on your back, your web belt, your gun, going down and climbing up--it’s just unbelievable. It gives you a totally different attitude . . . and what we’re doing is a piece of cake compared to what those guys did.”

“My respect for them has escalated about 700%,” says Charlie Sheen. “We’re just scraping the surface because it’s not a life-and-death situation here. But if it was real--a different ballgame, man, a very different ballgame.”

Last line in the script, from Sheen’s Chris as he leaves Vietnam: “. . . Those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.”

Last line from Ernie Pyle’s “Brave Men,” written during World War II: “Submersion in war does not necessarily qualify a man to be the master of the peace. All we can do is fumble and try once more--try out of the memory of our anguish--and be as tolerant with each other as we can.”