Coming Home Is Never Easy

Sundown, and the heavy curtains are drawn in his Santa Monica office. Oliver Stone is freshly showered, his hair roughed with a towel. He drops into a stuffed chair. He calls for wine! He calls for water! From a photograph atop a tall cabinet, eyes of young men look down on him. One pair of eyes is his own. It was another life back then. A different world. It was Vietnam.

No American filmmaker has drawn from the outrage of his own experience to plunge so deeply, so persistently, so flamboyantly, into the futile war the U.S. waged against communism in Southeast Asia.

Another pair of young eyes is watching Stone. Seated on a chesterfield to his left is a man half his age--27 to Stone’s 53. Alert, slightly stiff, his face tender, even admiring, Tony Bui is a child of the war, a refugee. Like Stone, he uses cinema to tear through the myths of this past.

Ghosts crowd into room. We should have expected them.

The idea had been straightforward. Twenty-five years after the U.S. was driven from Saigon, Oliver Stone and Tony Bui would meet for the first time at the invitation of The Times. The Vietnam vet and Vietnamese American, both sons of military officers, would reflect on this old conflict and the meaning-laden, deeply personal cinemagraphic vision they draw from it. I sat across the coffee table to moderate, not because I know film but because some of my youth washed away in the mud of Vietnam too.

The conversation didn’t work out exactly as planned. With Vietnam things never do, isn’t that how the cliche goes?

*

Three films on Vietnam, three perspectives, three windows into the experience: “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Heaven and Earth.” Still today, Stone boils with the war.

Bui’s life and emerging celebrity as a filmmaker rose from the same cataclysm but to different ends.

His tranquil, poetically photographed 1999 film “Three Seasons” unrolls as counterpoise to the fiery intensity of Stone’s visions. The story gently enters the lives of three working-class Vietnamese who are making their way in postwar Ho Chi Minh City. It was the first American film shot in Communist Vietnam. Dialogue is spoken in Vietnamese, and only occasionally does the film connect directly to America and the war.

Who would have guessed?

Not Bui.

In Hollywood, as with many things involving power and money, people mark their status by how late they can arrive and still hold their audience. Bui enters the casual, rough-wood lobby of Stone’s production offices only 10 minutes past the appointed time, practically prompt. Stone himself waits an hour to make his appearance.

In the interval, Bui talks a little about his next project: He is putting into production a second film, written by him and directed by his brother, Timothy. Set entirely at the California Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, “Green Dragon” is a tale of a South Vietnamese refugee camp a week before the fall of Saigon in April 1975, and for three months after.

“It’s the story of our childhoods, in part,” he says.

The brothers hope to have the film finished to show at the Sundance Festival, which a year ago awarded “Three Seasons” the Grand Jury Prize for drama and the Audience Award.

Bui, easy with a smile, easy with small talk, shuffles back and forth across the floor, revealing the anxiety that besets a young filmmaker hoping to make good on the promise of his first work. He is spending his pre-production days shopping for his new apartment. He is looking for the perfect kitchen blender, which he describes in all its detail. It is easier to talk about blenders than cinema when the film is still unexposed in the can.

Stone arrives. He lumbers through three doors to his ocean-facing sequester, which he nearly fills with his own bulk and persona. The next hour passes slowly, even painfully--strained, or, if you choose, illuminated, by Stone’s rocket flights of thought.

No, he said, he will not keep matters on track. “Off track is more interesting. If things get off track, people like that--you do analog, I’ll do digital,” he says, smiling.

Influenced by Conrad and Hemingway, and by his father, a World War II lieutenant colonel, Stone concedes youthful romanticism about war. John Wayne shaped his views too. “John Wayne, ‘Sands of Iwo Jima,’ as a kid I loved it.”

All that is gone now, replaced by bottomless cynicism. Wars, at the root, “are motivated by greed, profit, money. The Vietnam War was a totally symbolist event. It was surreal. I mean, it was a very important event. It grew in importance afterward. It showed that America was vulnerable. The elephant could be defeated by the ant.”

In his soul, the spot occupied by Vietnam is “terrible. Thank God I had another life. Many Vietnam veterans didn’t. . . .”

Stone continues, his inflections and pauses dramatic. “Little did we know what we were getting into. So for me, at the beginning, it was a great adventure. My parents had divorced. I had no life in America. I was writing a book. I went to Vietnam with romantic ideas, you see.”

That was the first time. He taught at a Catholic school in Saigon. It was 1965 and the war was heating up, but America had innocence and arrogance to burn.

Then Stone traveled and finished his self-conscious book about himself. It was rejected by publishers. It was now 1967. Downcast, he returned to Vietnam as a soldier.

“I was very suicidal, but I couldn’t pull the trigger on myself. So I figured, hey, let somebody else kill me if it’s meant. I insisted on the front lines--they made me cut point like in ‘Platoon.’ I tell you, I wanted to go to the bottom of the barrel. I wanted to see how bad it could get. Then I could only believe in myself as a person. That was authentic.

“Because New York City was not authentic. Yale University was not authentic. And those are the people who are running the country right now, you understand? It is a real bind for me. Because all the guys who came back from Vietnam, we’re all f-----. We are f-----. And I don’t mean to be self-pitying, but we are so out of touch with our generation.

“You know what I’m talking about. You come back, you can’t sit in a room and talk. Your value system is different. You’ve seen things at the dirtiest level. And people sit there, and they’re mostly hypocrites, you know? They’re mostly hypocrites in America. . . .”

Yes, Oliver, we know.

Don’t we?

*

The son of a South Vietnamese Air Force captain, Bui was 2 years old when once-proud, always lovely Saigon turned convulsive and began to fall in April 1975. Two weeks ahead of North Vietnamese tanks, Mom, Dad, Bui and his 5-year-old brother, Timothy Linh Bui, fled the country with American assistance. It was to be a short exile. The Bui family expected to go no farther than perhaps Guam. Things would work out, calm would return to Saigon. The Buis would come home.

All of this Tony Bui knows because he was told. None of it took hold in memory. He thinks he can remember something of the airplane flight out.

But calm did not return to the renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Guam was only a first stop on the long retreat for those who served in the failed cause of the south. Eventually, the Buis were brought to the mainland U.S., processed through the disorienting refugee system. They resettled in that most optimistically named American suburb, Sunnyvale, Calif.

“For me, there was always this weird tug of war: my parents trying to talk to me about the war and about Vietnam, while I tried to push it away,” Bui says about the next 17 years of his life.

In school, he recalls feeling shame--well, not shame exactly, but a stigma something like it. There were few other Vietnamese families in the community. The war had humbled America, and America was not happy to be reminded of it. Bui camouflaged himself as a Filipino.

At 19, he returned to see his homeland. He found it hot, humid, teeming. In short, awful to the sensibilities of a “spoiled” American kid, as he puts it. He fled again.

Arriving back in San Francisco, he wept. The epiphany came after. Whatever he had seen that was so fearfully strange began to turn in the teenager’s mind.

“Six months later I went back, and again, and again, and again. I remember watching things, learning, reading, trying to get a greater consciousness of my past and how that was affecting my future,” he says. “So thank God I went back, because it completely changed my life.”

Stone: “Can I ask a question?”

Bui: “Sure.”

Stone: “You want a tough question? You’re a young man. You escaped the war. You would have been hurt in that war. Everybody was hurt. Families were destroyed. In ‘Heaven and Earth’ two boys go to war. You never see them until the end of the movie. One is dead. The one is bitter. The sisters are all separated. The father dies. . . .”

Bui: “It’s very, very strong.”

Stone: “You missed all that. You must have some guilt? . . . You know that the country has always had a tenet: Be prepared to defend Vietnam.”

Bui: “For me, it’s tough. I defend Vietnam in different ways. I don’t know if I would carry a gun to go defend Vietnam. But I think making ‘Three Seasons’ was to try to give a different vision of Vietnam. Through my work, hopefully, and what I say about it, I defend it like that--how I try to absorb myself in the country today, try to get to the consciousness of the people, their sense of forgiveness and peace. Which I did not understand growing up here.”

Bui has an afterthought. He pauses and looks at the two men in the room. Oliver Stone sacrificed his 21st birthday flying over the international date line en route to war. I lost my 18th birthday the same way--one moment I was 17, officially too young to fight. Then the plane landed, the calendar had leaped forward and it was the day past my birthday and I was legally sanctioned for combat.

“That’s the guilt I feel,” Bui allows. “Because I spent my birthdays at home in California, partying.”

*

Maybe all these years later, Stone simply cannot put a square frame around his feelings. Maybe he is toying behind the role he allows himself as Hollywood rogue. Or maybe what comes from Stone are the same wild neutrons we detect in the guy on the street corner with the signboard in his lap. Vietnam can be suppressed but cannot be contained by the combat veteran, even the magnificently creative veteran.

Is there a great unmade movie left from the war?

“I should tell you?” Stone growls. “I could, but I’d have to kill you. . . . I’ve never given up.”

If John Wayne shaped the ideas of those Americans who went to Vietnam early in the war--in the mid-1960s--what will Stone’s legacy be for the children of tomorrow?

He laughs. “Did three Vietnam films, four if you include ‘JFK’ because there were some dealings with the Vietnamese War and Kennedy versus Johnson versus Eisenhower. It was really Eisenhower that started the war. Financially we supported most of the French effort. We were in serious discussion to drop nuclear bombs in Vietnam in 1954--although Ho Chi Minh had sent us letters, to Truman in ‘47, saying that George Washington was his hero and the Constitution of the United States was what he most respected.

“I went to Ho Chi Minh’s house two, three times. It’s just incredible. He fought this war from this simple little cottage. He used to have his cabinet meetings, outdoors sitting in a wood-and-straw chair. And yet the bombs would never hit there for some reason. In his garden, that’s where he ran the war. The Pentagon, by comparison, is 3,000 times bigger. And he beat the Pentagon, this little guy. Ho Chi Minh was an amazing man. And there was something about his face I always liked. What was your question?”

But of course.

No straight answers about the Vietnam War. Someday maybe. But not yet. Not for those who lived it, and who carry it with them.

As “Platoon’s” scar-faced Sgt. Barnes says: “There is the way it ought to be. And there is the way it is.”