Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(43)

I then shaved and took a short break from shooting in order to head into the woods for four days with other actors in Lieutenant Dan’s platoon to train with a technical advisor named Dale Dye, a decorated Vietnam veteran. Captain Dye had served in the United States Marine Corps, and he’d trained the actors for Platoon, as well as serving as technical advisor for many other military-themed films over the years. He put us through our paces. I’d pictured Lieutenant Dan much like my brother-in-law Mac Harris. Both Mac and Lieutenant Dan focused tightly on their military careers, and both wanted to be the best platoon leaders they could be. While Mac had gone to West Point, I wanted Lieutenant Dan to have a slight southern accent, so I decided that he had gone to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).

For four days we lived in the woods. At night, we needed to maintain silence. It grew pitch black, and we couldn’t have lights. We slept in the dirt and maintained a constant guard. Days were hot and muggy. Snakes slithered by us. Rats scuttled past. Mosquitoes were relentless. We couldn’t bathe. It rained on us, we stayed wet, we stunk. All this was designed to give us a taste of how it felt to be in a platoon in the jungle. It also gave me the opportunity to lead my men. I learned how to navigate, read maps, plan missions, and take care of my platoon.

On the last day in the woods, Captain Dye sent us on a mission. I needed to quietly lead my platoon several kilometers to another part of the forest where we were ordered to attack a base they’d set up. The maps tell you where there’s a hill or water or trail. We started the mission, and everything progressed fine. Then we came out of a tree line into an open area, and everything suddenly erupted. Boom! Boom! Boom! We all hit the dirt. I went down right on top of an anthill. Captain Dye and his crew from Warriors, Inc. had planted a bunch of charges in secret to simulate mortar explosions and artillery. We carried real rifles, loaded with blanks, and my platoon started firing back. It was my job to get them under control and move them out of the open into the cover of the forest. We did that, but as a result my navigation plan got out of whack. I was lost in the woods, which was exactly what Captain Dye wanted, since real missions seldom go exactly as planned. We ended up traversing a waist-deep creek, and eventually we made it to the area we were supposed to attack. There, Captain Dye and his crew were waiting in ambush for us, poised as the enemy. We got the snot knocked out of us. On our way back to base camp, Dale and I walked together, and he gave me an evaluation. Even though some things had gone wrong, he gave me a pretty good grade. And years later, he gave me a good pat on the back, saying I could have made a fine soldier. The shower I took my first night out of the woods was one of the best showers I ever had.

The next morning we were back on the set, filming the Vietnam sequences. We shot all the marching scenes, all the rain scenes, and then the scene on the base where Forrest Gump and his good friend Bubba first meet Lieutenant Dan. Forrest and Bubba are “replacements”—soldiers sent into an established unit to take the place of others who’ve been wounded or killed. Lieutenant Dan meets Bubba and Forrest and gives them a few terse lessons on how to behave in the field. The meeting is the first image viewers see of Lieutenant Dan. He’s on his way to the outhouse, toilet paper in hand, wearing only boxer shorts and flip-flops. The shot was made strategically, because we wanted viewers first to see Lieutenant Dan standing on two good legs. Those legs would soon be gone.

During the shooting of the Vietnam scenes, I invited on the set my brother-in-law Jack Treese, who’d been a combat medic in Vietnam. The costume designer had issued me a set of dog tags. But when Jack was in Vietnam, he’d made a set of rosary beads out of string and rope and hung his dog tags on it. Jack let me wear his actual dog tags and rosary in the movie. Jack wasn’t Catholic, but he told me that in Vietnam he wanted all the help he could get.

We shot the battle scenes on Fripp Island in a forest near a golf course. The greensmen brought in all kinds of jungle foliage to make it look more like Vietnam. It was almost comical. On one side of a tree line, golfers were teeing off, and on the other side, we were staging a battle and blowing things up.

When we shot the main battle sequence where all hell breaks loose, everyone was tense on set. The special effects team spent the whole day setting up charges and squibs (the little explosions you see when bullets hit the ground). The pressure’s really on an actor in this type of scene, because you need to nail it in one take. If you mess up, another entire day is required to get it all set up again.

Everything was choreographed and rehearsed. At least eight cameras were set up and running. Bob Zemeckis called for action. The charges started to explode. We were supposed to wait for a cue, but with so many bombs going off we couldn’t hear our signal. Bubba went for it anyway and screamed, “Run, Forrest, run!” And Lieutenant Dan yelled at everybody to pull back. Explosions burst everywhere. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! We played along and kept going. But we were slightly off on our timing. Bob was ticked at us because we almost missed our cue. Fortunately, the scene worked anyway, so in the end Bob was happy.

During the main battle scene, Lieutenant Dan is blown up and his legs are severely mangled. Several of his soldiers are killed. With his platoon under fire, Lieutenant Dan is on the radio trying to call in an air strike. Forrest runs in, trips over him, and sees the lieutenant is badly wounded. Forrest picks him up and carries him to safety out of the jungle. As Tom Hanks is running with me slung over his shoulder, a rocket-propelled grenade is fired toward us. It blows up the tree next to us, and we fall. Tom grabs me by the scruff of my fatigues and drags me the rest of the way out of the jungle while I fire a .45 revolver at the enemy. While I’m firing, the .45 jams, so we need to do another take. Captain Dye started giving me crap about it, saying it was my fault. I was hot and tired and beat up and not in the mood, so we got in each other’s faces. My brother-in-law Jack was filming with a little handheld camera, and he caught some of the hullabaloo on tape. Captain Dye and I were both just releasing tension, so however it looked we held no hard feelings between us.