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soviet-history-detective · 5 years ago

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Legasov You Did Not Know

I am going to share an ingot of solid gold right now, the kind that will break your heart and ruin your day.

I have unearthed this some time ago from a book that’s been long out of print. It is the translation of a truly heart-wrenching eulogy written by his late widow, Margarita Mihailovna Legasova. There is a lot of new information about Legasov in this piece, the kind of things only the wife of 30 years would know.

Defenceless Victor—Margarita Legasova’s title of her reminiscences

This title in Trud was followed by a quotation by Valery Legasov:

There are two colour photos hanging in my office at work. One of them is of a Nuclear Atomic Plant, the other of storks. These photos hang near each other as a reminder of the close relationship between life, nature and technology, letting one know beforehand of the fragility of life, about the necessity to keep it. I recalled these photos when I worked in Chernobyl eliminating the consequences of the accident at the NPP. Really, could storks in the future, living on the earth, feel themselves to be safe with modern industry? Is such a peaceful coexistence possible? And if possible, then what should be done to achieve this?

It was not until 10 years after the accident and eight years after Valery Legasov’s death that his widow published a short memoir in Trud that unequivocally confirmed that her husband had committed suicide on 27 April 1988. They had first met when students in the same institute and together worked at a students’ building construction project in what were termed in the USSR as the virgin lands. Under the title Defenceless Victor she described her memories of Legasov’s troubled times at Chernobyl and the period afterwards when he was, to a certain extent, ostracized by the establishment. She also includes interesting comments on what life was like for a senior scientist and his family in the Soviet system: very different from the experiences of Western scientists.

***

Last year we at last completed erection of a gravestone on his grave. This was with thanks to my son and daughter and a few supporters and colleagues of the Academician who helped to cover the expenses. That day when the sculptor invited me to his workshop and showed me the completed work, Valery returned home in the form of his bronze sculpture. He often had to travel away on business trips, we tried to be patient and wait for his return, but on 27 April 1988 he was transported away, already lifeless, forever.

On Saturday 26 April 1986, Valery left for an ordinary business meeting where he learned about the Chernobyl NPP accident and that evening he was already 2 km away from the destroyed reactor. Life seemingly continued but terrible forebodings did not allow us to relax and stop worrying about his health. After 27 April our acquaintances began to say that badly irradiated victims of the accident had begun to be transported to Moscow to Hospital No. 6. Nobody could tell me when he would return.

On the morning of 5 May about 8am there was a ring at the door bell and Valery entered in a borrowed suit of clothes and carrying a polythene bag with belongings rather than his normal case. He was very thin, with a dark face, red eyes and the palms of his hands were tanned black. He only had time to wash, change, breakfast and ask about his two grandchildren before he had to leave at 10am for a meeting. There was no time to tell us what was the state of events at Chernobyl. Then at lunchtime one of his assistants telephoned and said that Boris Scherbina wanted him again at Chernobyl.

It was only when he returned home later that he was able to tell us that he had personally entered the most dangerous areas in the fourth reactor and how shaken he was at the criminal carelessness displayed at the NPP before the explosion.

He next returned home on 13 May and it seemed to us that the biggest difficulties were in the past: but we soon understood that we were mistaken. By summer Valery was already in poor health, suffering from frequent headaches, chronic insomnia, nausea and stomach illness. It was difficult to recognize the earlier Valery in this morally depressed man. He was taken many times for medical investigation to Hospital No. 6 of the atomic establishment. Heart insufficiency, serious leukocytosis, problems with his myelocytes and bone marrow were diagnosed, as well as neurosis. But no official diagnosis was made of radiation syndrome, although I had no doubt that it was so.

He became an Academician at the early age of 45 but some of the leading figures of Soviet science called him ‘A boy from the chemical suburbs’. However, he was interesting to work with and liked jokes, being famous as an amusing raconteur, although everyone knew that science was the principal interest of his life. His private family life was unknown to his colleagues.

For five years, 1964–69, we lived in a flat of 22 square metres at Nizhegorodskaya Street. Though we could use only communal transportation we often made trips together with our two little children to Kuskovo, Ostankino and Arkangelskoye. In Tsaritsino we enjoyed ski holidays. It now seems that these were the happiest times of our lives.

Valery was a car enthusiast for the last 10 years of his life and loved driving at very high speeds. He had always wanted a private car and his first, which was also his last, was a GAZ-25 Volga which we bought in 1977 for 9500 roubles when he was a Candidate Member of the Academy of Sciences. The initial capital for the purchase was his quota from his State Prize received for his achievements in the field of chemistry.

We usually celebrated New Year in the circle of our family, sometimes in a rest house. One of these days a pure bred chau chau puppy appeared in our family and it was assumed that it was my New Year’s gift. Ma Lu Thomas, as she was called, would recognize only Valery as his owner and loved being in our car. She was inseparable from him and died just after Valery’s death. He was also an adoring grandfather to Misha and Valerik and invented little poems for them and played charades.

As a boy he received a musical education and for many years was interested in listening and understanding classical music: Grieg, Sibelius, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. He was also fond of Schnitke. Over the years we bought tickets for many concerts in the Tschaikovsky Concert Hall of the Musical Conservatoire. Valery’s last concert was in Lithuania in the summer of 1987: for flute and organ. Little did I know that soon afterwards Valery would make a first attempt to commit suicide. He swallowed a handful of Triptizol tablets but that time the physicians managed to save him.

In one Soviet TV programme is was said that Academician Legasov was a sincere believer. It is not so. From autumn 1987 he began to read the Bible and thought much about what he read. He was not baptised a Christian, but respected religion even though he was brought up an atheist.

He considered that the East was weak and during his business trips he tried to see as much as possible of culture. He very much wanted to visit one of the sacred Islamic places, the mausoleum of Hoja Ahmed Iasavi, and the monument erected in honour of the ancient Turkish poet who lived in the twelfth century and was an advocate of Sufism. We visited the ancient city of Yami and worshipped at the grave of the philosopher, and Valery often recalled his verses:

Having met a man of another faith

Don’t be evil to him

The God does not like people

With a cruel heart...

After their death punishment

Waits for them...

On his return from the Chernobyl NPP Valery told very sparingly, with tears in his eyes, about the unpreparedness for the accident. Those days nobody could precisely estimate the number of victims, but Legasov understood better than others, the lack of necessary means of health protection: pure water, food products, iodine prophylaxis.

In August 1986 Valery Legasov presented a report to IAEA experts at a meeting in Vienna, about the causes and the consequences of the accident. His five-hour report was very well received and he returned home triumphal. But soon his mood changed. During the last two years after the accident he suffered great psychological trauma and his inner strength was broken.

Twice he was nominated for a high award from the State, and twice the nomination was cancelled. He received a suggestion that he might take up a position with the IAEA in the field of nuclear technology: again, obstacles appeared. There was also the planned nomination for Director of a Research Centre on the Problems of Industrial and Nuclear Safety: this came to nothing. His election as a Member of the French Academy of Sciences was apparently assured and although we went to Paris on 4 February 1988, his last business trip, he did not receive Membership. Also, just after his Paris trip he was hospitalized with acute leukocytosis, pneumonia and severe neurosis.

Chernobyl was not only a tragedy of international importance but it was also the personal tragedy of the gifted scientist Valery Legasov.

Source: Chernobyl Record- The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe, R F Mould

Notes:

I had a feeling there was more to Legasov than what we see in the written material out there (I read Russian at upper intermediate level so I have access to quite a lot of info, and I have read the magnificent in-depth science-engineering reform articles of him which were absolutely jaw-dropping in their visionary quality. Yet some of the information in this article blew my mind. Legasov’s intellectual side is far deeper than anyone’s guess, that is evident.

All the documentary films and other material mention Legasov took sleeping pills in his first suicide attempt in 1987, but it turns out it was Triptizol, which is the brand name of Amitriptyline -a powerful antidepressant prescribed for major depression and where SSRI’s don’t work. It has been used as sleeping medicine in the US, but I have no clue if it had such use in the USSR. It is known Legasov developed a serious insomnia problem, but he was also diagnosed with major clinical depression.

Margarita Legasova was a professor of chemistry, they both graduated from the prestigious Mendeleev School of Chemistry, where they met (as mentioned in the beginning.)

The dog’s name sounds like it’s mistranscribed or something, in Russian language articles written by Legasov’s close friends she is mentioned as Tomka. Poor thing stopped eating after she realized he was gone forever and died shortly after.

#legasov #chernobyl #Valery Legasov

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historicity-was-already-taken · 7 years ago

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You've probably answered this b4, but who was the Pharaoh of and what date do you think was the Exodus? I like the Amarna period and the one God people all got exiled to Canaan ... but so many theories.

Note Before I Answer: This is not a political response, nor is it a religious one. Keep all that hell discourse out of my notes, please. Love you!

Short Answer: According to my readings of the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near Eastern mythos, contemporary archaeological works, Biblical scholarly literature, and the history of the Levant in the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age, I am of the opinion that the story conveyed in Exodus–>Joshua never happened. I also might be wrong.

Long Answer:

There’s this thing called the Documentary Hypothesis, founded by Julius Wellhausen, and recently expanded upon by Richard Elliott Friedman. There is no scholarly consensus on the veracity of the Hypothesis, but it makes the most sense to me when placed alongside the archaeological records, the known historical record, and Sumerian (etc) myth cycles. The very short and sweet explanation of the Documentary Hypothesis is that there are four main narrative strands within the Hebrew Bible: the J Source, E source, D Source, and P Source. Plus the Redactor. The J (“Yahwist”) and E (Elohist) sources are the oldest. J represents the oral history, mythos, etc of what would become the southern Kingdom of Judah, and E represents the same for the northern Kingdom of Israel. The two sources were combined by the D Source, the “Deuteronomist” sometimes after the fall of Israel to the Neo-Assyrain Empire in 721 BCE. The P Source is the “Priestly” source and it’s not really relevant to this particular conversation

The D Source’s combining of J and E wasn’t just about creating a compendium of myth, or folk religion, or oral history, it was about asserting the political and spiritual dominance of the Kingdom of Judah over the Kingdom of Israel, and hegemonizing Israelite worship practices from polytheistic to hardcore monotheistic. So, in Genesis we see a lot of cosmological and general mythological archetypes which, if you knew where to look, reflect aspects of God/Goddess cycles from all across Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Ancient Near East. (Check out my posts from 2011 and 2012 to learn more about how Genesis is secretly about a life goddess murdering some guy who kept stealing shit from her garden and banging his granddaughters)(that’s a hyperbolic assessment)

So Genesis happens blah blah blah, and then Joseph heads down to Egypt, his fam follows, time flies, and then came a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph etc the Israelites left Egypt, wandered the desert for 40 years, then blew down the walls of Jericho under Joshua, slaughtered all the Canaanites and took back the Promised Land. A grand, epic ending to a super-long Israelite cosmology.

Except, according to Joshua, the Israelites were supposed to have destroyed a large number of Canaanite cities within a fairly small period of time. But the archaeological record of those cities show destruction layers hundreds of years apart, even within the larger 1100-1300 BCE timeframe typically used to look for a historical Exodus situation. And to make things even more awkward, the Book of Judges is supposed to happen after the Book of Joshua. Except, in the Book of Judges, the various Israelite clans very obviously live alongside Canaanites and Philistines. And they don’t even have hegemony over Canaan, like, most of the Book of Judges is about Israelite groups getting into border skirmishes with Canaanites. Who, according to Joshua, were supposed to be dead.

Awkward, but there’s an explanation.

There’s an archaeological theory called the Israelites as Canaanites theory, and it’s the one that makes the most sense to me. According to this theory, there was no Exodus, and the proto-Israelites never left the Levant; the Israelites WERE Canaanites. During the Bronze Age, the Levant was pretty evenly split between Egypt and the Hittite Empire, possibly leading to a memory of life under Egyptian rule which the D Source used as inspiration for the Exodus. The Bronze Age Collapse left the Levant in a bit of a power vacuum. That power vacuum opened the door for new groups and peoples to form identities, and claim territories, and have border disputes and form like, little backwater kingdoms for the Neo-Assyrians to laugh at.*

According to archaeologist William Dever, sometime around 1200 BCE, evidence starts to show up in the archaeological record of something new happening in the central Judean hill country: semi-permanent circular settlements, removed from other Canaanite sites of the period, with no evidence of pork consumption. The archaeological record does not show evidence of a new group entering Canaan, but it does show evidence of a new material culture growing in the highlands.

If we are to understand Judges as a compendium of oral history, verse, myth, legend, and regional adapted archetypes from the pre-monarchical Israelite past, then that past is one of slow emergence and separation, not of dramatic racial and territorial conquest. And honestly, how do you go from winning a glorious genocidal campaign under one ruler to fighting a vague series of clan and border disputes within a loosely organized tribal society ruled by a warrior/mystic figure? Well, you kind of don’t. At least, not within a year.

So, that’s how Biblical textual analysis, ancient near eastern history and mythology, and the archaeological record come together for me to lead me to view that Exodus, the grand Israelite cosmology as conveyed in the Genesis-Joshua, didn’t happen. At least, not the way it is described, and not the way we think about it.

Now, further reading because you know I don’t pull this out of my ass ok:

Old Testament Parallels (New Revised and Expanded Third Edition): Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East by Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) by Eric Cline

From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible by Eric Cline

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? by William Dever

Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel by William Dever

The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein

Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Eliot Friedman

A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, Second Edition by J. Maxwell Miller and John Haralson Hayes

A Brief History of Ancient Israel by Victor H. Matthews

The Social History of Ancient Israel: An Introduction by Rainer Kessler

A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC [Blackwell History of the Ancient World Ser.] by Marc Van De Mieroop

The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age by Assaf Yasur-Landau

*I’m going to Jew hell for that one.

#historicity of exodus #biblical studies #biblical scholarship #late bronze age #biblical archaeology

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back-and-totheleft · 3 years ago

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"Vietnam as it really was"

Oliver Stone sprang up in bed and found fear staining his sheets. A dream had startled him awake. He was 16 years out of Viet Nam, but in the dream, "they had shipped me back. Somehow they found me at the age of 38 and sent me back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror." That was two years ago. Now Stone, who earned a Bronze Star and a MASH unit's worth of physical and emotional wounds in the jungles of Viet Nam, has transformed his war experience -- the bad dream he lived through for 15 months in 1967-68 -- into a film called Platoon. With craft, crackle, a little bombast and plenty of residual rage, he has created a time-capsule movie that explodes like a frag bomb in the consciousness of America, showing how it was back then, over there.

Begin with a birth: a baby-faced soldier, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), is delivered from the womb of a transport plane into the harsh light of Viet Nam. He will find death soon enough: four patrols in the film, four wrenching revelations. On Chris' first night patrol he watches, paralyzed with fear, as the enemy approaches and another new boy dies. On a second patrol the platoon enters a village that might be My Lai; anger goads Chris to spit bullets at the feet of a petrified Vietnamese, and before the day is over the group's leader, Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), has seen to the slaughtering of villagers before the entire place is torched. During a third battle, Barnes tracks down a woods-wise sergeant, Elias (Willem Dafoe), who had interrupted Barnes' massacre, shoots him and leaves him for dead. On the final patrol Chris flips into heroism or psychosis, wipes out a nest of North Vietnamese and confronts the demon he has almost become. End with a murder -- the last of too bloody many.

Welcome to the old nightmare -- the one neither Stone nor the 2.7 million American soldiers who went to Viet Nam can shake. Welcome back to the war that, just 20 years ago, turned America schizophrenic. Suddenly we were a nation split between left and right, black and white, hip and square, mothers and fathers, parents and children. For a nation whose war history had read like a John Wayne war movie -- where good guys finish first by being tough and playing fair -- the polarization was soul-souring. Americans were fighting themselves, and both sides lost.

Platoon pushes the metaphor further, thousands of miles away from the "world," into the combat zones of Nam. Platoon says that American soldiers -- the young men we sent there to do our righteous dirty work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center, it was sibling riflery. Stone's achievement is to pound and hack this theme into a ripping yarn about a good man, an evil man and an Everyman -- a young, romanticized Oliver Stone -- suspended between them with his life and ideals in the balance. In vivid imagery and incendiary action, Stone's film asks of our soldiers, "Am I my brother's killer?" The answer is an anguished yes.

And a resounding "you bet" to the question, Can a ferocious movie about an unpopular war, filmed on the cheap with no stars and turned down by every major studio, find success, controversy and the promise of an Oscar statuette at the end of the tunnel? In its early limited opening, Platoon is already a prestige hit, and the film shows signs of becoming a blockbuster as it opens across the country over the next three weeks. It has captivated intellectuals, movie buffs and urban grunts -- astonishing, across-the-board appeal for a hellacious sermon. It has ignited a fire storm of debate, from political swamis and Viet vets, on its merits as art and history. It is the fountainhead for a freshet of Viet Nam exploration: We Can Keep You Forever, a BBC documentary about the mystery surrounding MIAs, will be aired Wednesday in 21 U.S. cities, and this spring will see two new movies set in Viet Nam, The Hanoi Hilton and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. In a movie season of Trekkies, Dundees and dentist-devouring houseplants, Oliver Stone has proved that a film can still roil the blood of the American body politic. Platoon the picture is now Platoon the phenomenon.

It is a picture first and foremost, a series of pictures that lodge in the mind with other indelible images of war. The prop wash from a landing helicopter blows the tarpaulins off three bodies, their shrouds torn off, their makeshift graves defiled. In the village, after the slaughter, the soldiers carry Vietnamese children on their shoulders -- G.I. Joes, big brothers to the kids whose village they have just destroyed -- and the soldier who bashed a man's head takes a tourist snapshot of the holocaust. More than any other film, Platoon gives the sense -- all five senses -- of fighting in Viet Nam. You can wilt from the claustrophobic heat of this Rousseauvian jungle; feel the sting of the leeches as they snack on Chris' flesh; hear all at once the chorus of insects, an enemy's approaching footsteps on the green carpet and Chris' heartbeat on night patrol. The film does not glamourize or trivialize death with grotesque special effects. But it jolts the viewer alive to the sensuousness of danger, fear and war lust. All senses must be alert when your life is at stake, and Oliver Stone is an artist-showman who can make movies seem a matter of life and death.

Until Dec. 19, though, when Platoon opened, Hollywood had thought the picture a matter of indifference. It had taken Stone ten hungry years to get the project going. "For two years in the late '70s," says Producer Martin Bregman, "I banged on every door in California to get it done, but at that time Viet Nam was still a no-no." Tom Berenger, the film's showcase psychopath, imagines that "it must have made Stone feel like an old man, carrying the project around for so long. He said it broke his heart." Then something interesting happened: people went for Platoon. Most critics were impressed, many were impassioned, and even those who trashed the picture helped make it the season's top conversation piece. Soon long lines were forming outside the movie's Times Square flagship -- at lunchtime, on weekdays, in the hawk bite of a January wind -- and after midnight in early- to-bed Hollywood. In 74 theaters on the Jan. 9-11 weekend, Platoon averaged more than $22,000, the highest per-screen take of any new film.

In the industry, Stone's old colleagues and fellow directors have laid on their benedictions. Woody Allen calls it a "fine movie, an excellent movie." Says Steven Spielberg: "It is more than a movie; it's like being in Viet Nam. Platoon makes you feel you've been there and never want to go back." James Woods, who starred in Stone's previous film, Salvador, calls him an "artist whose vision transcends politics. Everyone from the ex-hippie to the ex-grunt can be moved by Platoon. And his passion isn't bogus -- he doesn't play Imagine at the end of the film to break people's hearts." Brian De Palma, who filmed Scarface from a Stone script, sees him achieving a volcanic maturity in Platoon: "He has now channeled his feeling and energy into a cohesive dramatic work. He's an auteur making a movie about what he experienced and understands. Seeing Platoon get through the system makes the soul feel good."

With its critical, popular and insider acclaim swelling, Platoon began to shoulder its way toward the front rank of Oscar favorites. By now it would have to be counted as the front runner, and Hollywood is furrowing its back with self-congratulatory pats for making this big bold message movie. To Stone, Hollywood's claim of paternity for Platoon must seem a rich joke. He and Hollywood both know that Platoon -- like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, The Killing Fields and nearly all the serious movies about the war in Southeast Asia -- secured its major financing from foreign producers. "It was a picture we wanted to support," says John Daly, chairman of Britain's Hemdale Pictures, which also produced Salvador. "We respect Oliver's passions. Besides, he spent only $6 million on Platoon" -- about half the budget of a typical Hollywood film.

The typical film, though, does not provoke a political free-for-all. Many conservatives have taken up arms against Platoon. In the far-right Washington Times' Insight magazine, John Podhoretz castigates it as "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." The film, he says, "blackens the name and belittles the sacrifice of every man and woman who served the United States in the Viet Nam War (including Stone)." Politicians are eager to return the salvos. Former Senator Gary Hart, aware of the electorate's fondness for presidential candidates with movie credentials, campaigns for the film by urging that "every teenager in America should see Platoon."

Now ask a man who's been there: David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times and, in The Best and the Brightest, documented two Administrations' slides into the Big Muddy. "Platoon is the first real Viet Nam film," Halberstam proclaims, "and one of the great war movies of all time. The other Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and politically accurate. It understands something that the architects of the war never did: how the foliage, the thickness of the jungle, negated U.S. technological superiority. You can see how the forest sucks in American soldiers; they just disappear. I think the film will become an American classic. Thirty years from now, people will think of the Viet Nam War as Platoon."

Neither Sly Stallone nor Oliver Stone can put the whole picture of Viet Nam on a movie screen. There were 2.7 million stories in the naked jungle. Each veteran has his own view of the war, and each will have his own vision of Platoon. More than a few are disturbed by its presentation of a military unit at war with itself. Says Bob Duncan, 39, who served in the 1st Infantry at the same time Stone was in the 25th: "He managed to take every cliche -- the 'baby killer' and 'dope addict' -- that we've lived with for the past 20 years and stick them in the movie about Viet Nam." Says another veteran, Nick Nickelson, 43: "I hope this doesn't bring back those old depictions. God help us, I don't want to go back into a closet again."

Other vets deny the prevalence of dope smoking and the depiction of military officers as either psychos or cowards. But John Wheeler, 42, a veteran who is president of the Center for the Study of the Viet Nam Generation in Washington and chairman of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund, argues that "there were drug cultures; there were green lieutenants. Stone wanted to clean out the festering part of the wound. The next Viet Nam movie may be the one that tells the whole truth: that we were the best-equipped, best-trained army ever fielded, but against a dedicated foe in an impossible terrain. It was a state-of-the-art war on both sides. But Platoon is a new statement about Viet Nam veterans. Before, we were either objects of pity or objects that had to be defused to keep us at a distance. Platoon makes us real. The Viet Nam Memorial was one gate our country had to pass through; Platoon is another. It is part of the healing process. It speaks to our generation. Those guys are us."

Listen to these guys, and you may suspect that Platoon is not so much a movie as a Rorschach blot. But that is part of the caginess of Stone's approach. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that when a good film is also a popular film, it is because of a misunderstanding. Platoon could very well be misunderstood into superhit status. The army of Rambomaniacs will love the picture because it delivers more bang for the buck; all those yellow folks blow up real good. Aging lefties can see the film as a demonstration of war's inhuman futility. Graybeards on the right may call it a tribute to our fighting men, in whatever foreign adventure. The intelligentsia can credit Platoon with expressing, in bold cinematic strokes, Stone's grand themes of comradeship and betrayal. And the average youthful moviegoer -- too young to remember Viet Nam even as the living-room war -- may discover where Dad went in the 1960s and why he came home changed or came home in a body bag.

"In any other war, they would have made movies about us too. Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch from Dong Ha, maybe even A Scrambler to the Front . . . But Viet Nam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up." So wrote Michael Herr in Dispatches, published in 1977, a year before the first spate of Viet Nam dramas. (The mid-'60s had offered a couple of World War II wheezes disguised as topical films: A Yank in Viet-Nam, so poorly received that it changed its name to Year of the Tiger, and John Wayne's hilariously wrongheaded The Green Berets, with its famous climax of the sun setting in the east.) 1978 brought three pictures -- Coming Home, The Boys in Company C and The Deer Hunter -- that touched on Viet Nam, and the following year Francis Coppola released Apocalypse Now.

Trouble was, most of these films were not about Viet Nam. Coming Home was a disabled-vet love story -- The Best Years of Our Lives with Jon Voight in the Harold Russell role. The Deer Hunter was . . . well, what was it? An incoherent parable about male bonding through Russian roulette. Bats and beautiful, it stood like Ishmael on the prow of its pretensions and declared, "Call me masterpiece." Apocalypse Now was fine as long as it accompanied its doomed, questing hero (played by Martin Sheen, Charlie's father) upstream on the River Styx; then it fogged off into fantasyland with Marlon Buddha. Only Company C, a standard-issue war film about recruits betrayed by their incompetent officers, spent much time in a Nam combat zone. But it really resided, with The Green Berets, in the twilight zone of World War II gestures and bromides.

Hollywood (and not just Hollywood) refused to see that Viet Nam was different. All the old givens -- beau geste, military master plans, unswerving belief in the officer class -- were fatally irrelevant to a guerrilla war. Forget the World War II narrative line of tanks and tactics, which moved with the ponderous sweep of a Golden Age Hollywood plot. Viet Nam, set in jungles without beginning or end, was a flash of episodic, aleatory explosions; it was modernism brought to war. And a new kind of war demanded a new look at the war-movie genre. Platoon fills the bill. It is a huge black slab of remembrance, chiseled in sorrow and anger -- the first Viet Nam Memorial movie.

Though Platoon is a breakthrough, it is not a breakaway. The film is traditional enough to connect with a mass audience. In its story line it holds echoes of Attack!, Robert Aldrich's 1956 psychodrama, in which a World War II infantry company is torn by a mortal struggle between two officers -- one messianic, the other deranged -- while a young man's loyalty hangs in the balance. Platoon's narration, in the form of Chris' letters to his grandmother, is often as stilted and redundant as silent-movie title cards. When a naive new boy shows Chris a photo of his sweetheart, you just know that, in the best '40s-movie fashion, the guy's a goner.

There are darker currents, too, of a passive racism. The black soldiers are occasionally patronized and sentimentalized; they stand to the side while the white soldiers grab all the big emotions. And the Vietnamese are either pathetic victims or the invisible, inhuman enemy. In the scheme of Platoon (and not just Platoon) they do not matter. The nearly 1 million Vietnamese casualties are deemed trivial compared with America's loss of innocence, of allies, of geopolitical face. And the tragedy of Viet Nam is seen as this: not that they died, but that we debased ourselves by killing them.

Of course, Platoon need not be every possible Viet Nam film to be the best one so far. It is enough that Stone has devised a drama of palpable realism that is also a metaphor for the uncivil war that raged in the U.S. and can flare up anytime in any family. Indeed, at the film's molten core is the tug of wills between two strong men, outsize figures of shameless strutting charisma, for parentage of their platoon and for their new recruit, Chris. Barnes, the staff sergeant, could be Chris' legal father; Elias, the romantic renegade, could be a spiritual father, even after his death. They are like Claudius and the Ghost wrestling for Hamlet's allegiance.

Both men are legendary soldiers who have survived long years in Viet Nam -- Elias by a kind of supernal sylvan grace, Barnes by simply refusing to die. Elias is Jesus crossed with Jim Morrison. He will literally take a load off Chris' shoulders, or share a fraternal toke with Chris through the barrel of a rifle, or moon over the night stars, or smile ingenuously at his killer. He is hard to know and harder to destroy, a creature of Stone's wild literary sentiment. Barnes, who says of some fresh corpses, "Tag 'em and bag 'em," has no sentiment at all. When he pulls a steaming metal shard out of a wounded G.I.'s side, it seems as much to display his expertise as to relieve the man's pain. He will do anything to achieve his objective: lead a suicide mission or send his rival on one; murder a village woman in cold blood or taunt his men toward murdering him. Chris, who feels an irresistible kinship to both men, says they were "fighting for possession of my soul." The film's most controversial question is, Who won?

At this point, readers who have not seen Platoon are excused for the next two paragraphs. The others, the grizzled vets, can ponder Chris' motives and actions at the film's climax. He believes (and we know) that Barnes has killed Elias in the jungle. He has already considered taking murderous revenge and been told, "The only thing that can kill Barnes is Barnes." On his last patrol, Chris' suicidal resolve turns him into a mean, obscene fighting machine -- a rifle with a body attached, as reckless as Barnes, as resourceful as Elias -- and he leaves half a dozen NVA in his wake. Now Barnes finds Chris and is ready to kill him when a blast knocks them unconscious. Later Chris revives and finds the injured Barnes ordering him to get a medic. The young man lifts his weapon and, when Barnes says, "Do it," does the bastard in.

In the movie theaters, this illegal shooting usually gets a big hand. Righteous vengeance. Good guy kills bad guy. It is the kind of movie catharsis that may make Platoon a megahit. But can Chris or the audience take moral satisfaction in this deed? Which "father" has he followed? Has Chris become like Elias, back from the grave to avenge his own murder? "You have to fight evil if you are going to be a good man," Stone says. "That's why Chris killed Barnes. Because Barnes deserved killing." Or has he emulated his enemy? Has he become Barnes in order to kill him? Stone has another answer: "I also wanted to show that Chris came out of the war stained and soiled -- all of us, every vet. I want vets to face up to it and be proud they came back. So what if there was some bad in us? That's the price you pay. Chris pays a big price. He becomes a murderer." A good man, and a murderer? It is a tribute to Platoon's cunning that it can sell this dilemma both ways, and a mark of Stone's complexity that he can argue either side and believe both.

The dichotomy was bred in him. Stone was born in 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker and the French Catholic girl he met just after V-E day while serving as a colonel on Eisenhower's staff. Lou Stone wrote a monthly newsletter about economics and politics; his son describes the style as "right-wing Walter Lippmann, a view of the world every month. My father believed that life was hard. The important thing was to make a living." Jacqueline Stone was just the opposite: inexhaustibly sociable, the original bete de fete. "My mother loved movies," Stone says, "and every Monday I'd play hooky, and we'd go see two or three movies. From the start, I had the contradiction in me: my mother's outgoing, optimistic, French side and the dark, pessimistic, Jewish side of my father."

The Stones lived in Manhattan town houses and Stamford, Conn., homes; Oliver went to Manhattan's tony Trinity School and the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.; he summered with his maternal grandparents and spoke French before he learned English. (From Viet Nam, Oliver would write his grandmother versions of the letters that Chris reads in Platoon.) At five he composed skits for a marionette show, casting his French cousins in the parts. At seven he wrote stories. To earn a quarter for a Classic comic book, he would write a theme each week for his father. And at nine he started work on a book, 900 pages about his family and his life.

Oliver stopped writing the book when he was twelve; the family stopped when Oliver was 16. "The news of their divorce came as a total shock," Stone recalls. "The Hill School headmaster was the one who told me. And when they were divorced, my father gave me the facts of life. He told me that he was heavily in debt. He said, 'I'll give you a college education, and then you're on your own. There's literally no money.' "

Lou Stone never recovered financially. "And yet," his son says, "I think his reversal helped push me to leave my privileged childhood behind. I finished Hill and spent a year at Yale, but I saw myself as a product -- an East Coast socioeconomic product -- and I wanted to break out of the mold. Then I read Lord Jim. Conrad's world was exotic and lush; it exercised a tremendous allure for me." It also propelled Oliver into a teaching job at a Chinese Catholic school in a Saigon suburb. It was 1965, the year a half million Yank soldiers landed in Viet Nam, and Stone was 18 years old. "I woke up in Asia," he says, "and it became an orphan home for me. It was everything I thought it would be: the heat, the green seas, the bloodred sunsets. In Saigon, the G.I.s from the 1st Infantry Division were just arriving. There were guys walking around with pistols, no curfews, shoot-outs in the streets. The place was like Dodge City."

Itinerary for a young wanderluster: on a merchant marine ship from Saigon to Oregon; in Guadalajara, Mexico, writing 400 pages of a novel; back to Yale, then dropping out a second and last time to concentrate on his writing. The book was now 1,400 pages. "It started out as a boy's suicide note -- not that I was going to commit suicide, but I was very depressed. It was Jack London- type experiences in a Joycean style. Totally insane, with great passages of lyricism here and there. I thought it was the best thing since Rimbaud. And when Simon & Schuster rejected it, I gave up. I threw half the manuscript in the East River and said, 'My father is right. I'm a bum.' I felt the solution was total anonymity. I had to atone. So I joined the Army. They'd cut my hair, and I'd be a number. To me the American involvement was correct. My dad was a cold warrior, and I was a cold-war baby. I knew that Viet Nam was going to be the war of my generation, and I didn't want to miss it. I must say, my timing was impeccable." If the young man had failed as Rimbaud, he might make it as Rambo.

Nope. "My first day in Viet Nam," Stone says, "I realized, like Chris in Platoon, that I'd made a terrible mistake. It was on-the-job training: Here's your machete, kid; you cut point. You learn if you can, and if not you're dead. Nobody was motivated, except to get out. Survival was the key. It wasn't very romantic." Each of the three combat units he served in was divided into antagonistic groups, as in the film: "On one side were the lifers, the juicers ((heavy drinkers)) and the moron white element. Guys like Sergeant Barnes -- and there really was a sergeant as scarred and obsessed as Barnes -- were in this group. On the other side was a progressive, hippie, dope- smoking group: some blacks, some urban whites, Indians, random characters from odd places. Guys like Elias -- and there really was an Elias, handsome, electric, the Cary Grant of the trenches. They were out to survive this bummer with some integrity and a sense of humor. I fell in with the progressives -- a Yale boy who heard soul music and smoked dope for the first time in his life."

Most of Platoon's starkest events come from Stone's backpack of Viet Nam memories. "I saw the enemy for the first time on my first night ambush," he recalls, "and I froze completely. Thank God the guy in the next position saw them and opened up. The ensuing fire fight was very messy. I was wounded in the back of the neck -- an inch to the right and I'd have been dead -- and the guy next to me had his arm blown off." He emptied his rifle clip at a man's feet, as Charlie does in the movie. "He wouldn't stop smiling," says Stone, "and I just got pissed off and lost it. But I did save a girl who was being raped by two of the guys; I think they would've killed her. I went over and broke it up. Another kid -- he's like Bunny ((Kevin Dillon)) in the movie -- clubbed this old lady to death and then kind of boasted about it. We killed a lot of innocents."

The battle at the end of the film was based on a New Year's Day skirmish less than a mile from the Cambodian border. "They hit us with about 5,000 troops that night. They laid bombs right on top of us; we dropped bombs right on them. It's possible that our high command was using us as bait to draw the Viet Cong out so we could inflict heavy casualties. We lost about 25 dead and 175 wounded; we killed about 500 of them. Their bodies were scraped up by bulldozers, just like in the movie. For that battle our platoon was on the inner perimeter, but two weeks later we went back into the same area and got hit by an ambush, like the one that gets Elias. We took about 30 casualties, and I don't think we got one of them."

For all the horrors of his season in hell, Stone admits he got what he went for, as a budding artist ravenous for material in the raw: "I saw combat at the ground level. I saw people die. I killed. I almost was killed. Almost immediately I realized that combat is totally random. It has nothing to do with heroism. Cowardice and heroism are the same emotion -- fear -- expressed differently. And life is a matter of luck. Two soldiers are standing two feet apart. One gets killed, the other lives. I was never a religious person -- I was raised Protestant, the great compromise -- but I became religious in Viet Nam. Possibly I was saved for a reason. To do some work. Write about it. Make a movie about it."

It would take Stone almost a decade, until 1976, before he could write the script of Platoon, and another decade to put it on the screen. But first he had to take his high, wired act on the road. The same month he arrived back from Viet Nam, he was busted for carrying an ounce of marijuana across the Mexico-U.S. border, and called his father, saying, "The good news is that I'm out of Viet Nam. The bad news is that I'm in a California jail, facing five to 20." Stone says his father helped get the charges dropped. "That was my homecoming," he says. "I got a true picture of the States. I hated America. I would have joined the Black Panthers if they'd asked me. I was a radical, ready to kill." Back home his mother noticed the change: "As a little boy he was impeccable. He had his valet; his closet was immaculate. But when he returned he was a mess, always leaving things on the floor. He was a different boy."

And now an unsolicited testimonial: "I know it sounds corny, but I was saved by film school." He enrolled at New York University on the G.I. Bill. "To be able to study movies in college, it was any movie buff's dream. It was cool too, like studying to be an astronaut. Martin Scorsese was my first teacher. He was like a mad scientist, with hair down to here. He was someone on an equal wave of nuttiness. And he helped channel the rage in me." Stone made a short film for Scorsese's class called Last Year in Viet Nam, about a vet wandering the New York streets; in another, Michael and Marie, Oliver's father played the victim. "Oliver was alienated, sarcastic and brooding," says his film-school friend Stanley Weiser, who is collaborating with Stone on a script about Wall Street crime. "A real macho man who carried the torture of Viet Nam with him but never talked about it."

In 1971 Stone graduated and married a Lebanese woman working at the Moroccan delegation to the United Nations; they divorced five years later. He wrote eleven scripts in his spare time, directed a low-budget Canadian thriller called Seizure, and in 1975 got an agent through the graces of Screenwriter Robert Bolt. A year later, as the tall ships clogged New York harbor, Stone sat down and wrote Platoon. "Essentially what I wanted to say was, Remember. Just remember what that war was. Remember what war is. This is it. I wanted to make a document of this forgotten pocket of time. I felt Viet Nam was omitted from history books. Like a battle I fought in during the war: a lot of people got hurt that day, and it wasn't even listed as a battle by the Army, as if they didn't want to admit the casualties we suffered. The script I wrote is pretty much the one I shot ten years later. But no studio wanted to make it; it was too 'depressing' and 'grim.' So I buried it again, figuring that the truth of that war would never come out because America was blind, a trasher of history."

A wild man who becomes a witness: that was Oliver Stone reborn. As he scythed his way through the Hollywood jungle, Stone earned the rep of a specialist with a social agenda. Four of the scripts that bear his name -- Midnight Express, Scarface, Year of the Dragon and 8 Million Ways to Die -- cataloged the seductive evils of the drug trade. Stone's third feature as writer-director (after Seizure and, in 1981, The Hand) laced his usual hip rants on pharmacology with a smart, anguished newsphoto montage of one more Third World nation torn by civil war and shadowed by the looming hulk of American weaponry. This was the gallivanting political melodrama Salvador. Stone dedicated the film to his recently deceased father. "I remember one conversation we had right before he died. He said, 'You'll do all right. There'll always be a demand for great stories and great storytellers.' So finally he forgave me for going into the film business."

In Salvador, Stone was learning to wind the cinematic mechanism until it coiled with productive tension, both on the screen and on the set. "Working with Stone was like being caught in a Cuisinart with a madman," James Woods opines. "And he felt the same about me. It was two Tasmanian devils wrestling under a blanket. But he's a sharp director. He starts with a great idea, delegates authority well, scraps like a street fighter, then takes the best of what comes out of the fracas." Says Dale Dye, the Marine captain who hazed Platoon's actors to firm them up for filming: "Oliver thrives on chaos, throwing together a crew of such diverse backgrounds and ideologies that there's constant friction. It's the kind of energy he thrives on." Platoon's star, Charlie Sheen, 21, found the director "brutally honest. Which is why we clicked. After a scene he'd say, 'You sucked' or 'You nailed it.' That's just my style."

Right now Stone is Hollywood's hot new guy. He is even entertaining the improbable idea of a Platoon TV series. But don't expect Stone to direct Indiana Jones III. Says Stanley Weiser: "Oliver's been around the block ten times and won't be seduced by money. He's not an easy lay." Stone and his second wife, Elizabeth, 37, look the family-album picture of swank domesticity in their Santa Monica home. They swore off drugs a few years ago, and now seem addicted only to each other and their little son Sean. "Success and Sean have made Oliver much mellower," Elizabeth notes. "But he's still a compulsive worker. Always reading or writing, he simply loves ideas. He's filled with them, and he's thrilled with them."

One suspects that the old troublemaker will find new trouble spots in the political landscape; the soapbox spieler will continue his spellbinding harangues. His mind and moral sense are too restless to relax in the glow of celebrity and the promise of statuettes. But for the moment, Oliver Stone has found for himself the one plot twist he would never have put in Platoon: a happy ending to his Viet Nam nightmare.

-Richard Corliss, Time magazine cover story, Jan 26 1987 [x]

#oliver stone #platoon #the vietnam war #time magazine #cover story #ptsd #richard corliss

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thetwomeatmeal · 8 years ago

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The latest ancient Near East book I’ve been reading -- Mario “I Wrote This From Memory” Liverani’s Ancient Near East: History, Society, and Economy -- just got to this really beautiful explanation of the late Bronze Age collapse after hundreds of pages of build-up. (And I’m writing this from memory, so please let me know if I got something wrong.) The collapse is one of those mega-events I find endlessly fascinating, partly as a touchstone for my own modern pessimism about climate and capital. In about 50 years at the beginning of the 12th century BC, almost every major Near Eastern city was destroyed. The ruling bronze-armored chariot-driving military class disappeared overnight, eventually replaced by iron-wielding foot-soldiers. Egypt, Hatti, Babylonia, and Mycenaean Greece, which together had controlled a good 2/3 of the region, virtually vanished as political entities, leaving space for new ethnic groups and political organizations -- notably, the first Philistine and Israelite kingdoms on the Mediterranean coast. And as in any other time when people have more pressing concerns than writing things down, we don’t know why.

One of the most frequent explanations given is that the migrant groups were the cause of the collapse. In fact, this is the explanation found in Egyptian historiography, which reports raids by “Sea Peoples” throughout the late 13th century. The “Sea Peoples” could also have been, as well-built Troy, the targets of one of civilization’s best-remembered wars. Weirdly enough, they were also involved in one of the most precisely remembered events of the period: we know that one of their raids took place on January 21, 1192 BC by dating a solar eclipse recorded on the tablet of some unfortunate Ugarite astronomer, who was taking it to the palace but only got as far as the end of a Seafolk spear. Anyway, we mostly hear about the Egyptians (and, potentially, the Greeks) gloriously defeating the Sea Peoples, but it stands to reason that they could’ve eventually overwhelmed the Land Peoples and become the Philistines, Greeks, or whoever. It especially stands to reason if you’re a 19th century historian rediscovering Egyptian literature and seeing all historical movement through a racial framework!

Liverani interjects that, even if a global Sea Person invasion did succeed, it could’ve only succeeded on the basis of a pre-existing internal weakness of the states it targeted. Why did the Egyptians and Hittites lose control of Syria-Palestine so rapidly? Why were state-of-the-art horse technology, complex bureaucratic networks, and fierce warrior-king ideology apparently defenseless against whatever it was? And might it have something to do with the issues maintaining vassalage in the region reported on back in the mid-14th century Amarna letters? In fact, argues Liverani, the problems date back further than that, to contradictions in land distribution that were central to the entire Near Eastern economic system for hundreds of years.

The first of these contradictions was the tension between (1) state, family, and personal property. The traditional Near Eastern state revolved around the palace and/or temple, which could take up a good third of the area of a city and employed hundreds of people, as “industrial” weavers and potters, religious officials, and administrative personnel in charge of trade and redistributing wealth. All of these people needed to be fed: this typically took the form of wages for manual laborers, while members of the professional classes got use rights on patches of state-owned land. Before the mid-2nd millennium, great kingdoms like Third Dynasty Ur and Old Babylonia were able to govern by scaling up this system, developing bureaucratic networks that could manage the economies of entire regions. But in fits and starts, this system was undergoing two major developments. First, these professionals started considering themselves owners of their land, thus making both it and the associated government positions inheritable. Second, a small group of them were able to accumulate a large amount of land, divorcing it from its traditional family ownership, and eventually, from any real government obligations. A large enough landowner could employ laborers instead of working it him/herself, thus making a living as a sort of primitive capitalist.

In the Hurrian city Nuzi, family property was appropriated through the unique tactic of “sale-adoption”, in which the buyer would be formally adopted by the seller so as to “inherit” their property, with the sale price given as a “gift” to the new “parent”. One Nuzite named Tehip-tilla became the son of over a hundred parents in his lifetime, and also filthy rich. Systems that had once been under the control of priests and bureaucrats eventually existed based on the consent of a landowning class, which ultimately became the charioteers of the Late Bronze.

But Tehip-tilla won’t buy your land unless you have reason to sell it, and you won’t turn around and work it for a wage unless you have nothing left. So a basic condition for this accumulation was the tension between (2) debt and freedom. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Near Eastern lenders charged exorbitant interest rates, putting many small farmers in a situation of quasi-permanent debt. They responded by selling their land, their children, and ultimately, themselves, becoming “debt slaves” to their creditors. This was widely recognized as a social problem as early as the late 3rd millennium, and rulers who wished to be honored as liberators would “proclaim freedom over the land”, annulling debts and releasing all debt slaves. Presumably, they would only have done this if debt slavery was a real felt threat to social order, but it’s a little hard to tell how threatening it was. The release of debts seems to have been an innovation of the c. 2400 Urukagina of Lagash, but eventually became SOP for new kings, so that lenders would plan their loans around upcoming coronations. (It’s hard not to read the Sabbatical year as a later reflection of this idea.) The phrase “this debt/enslavement is not cancelled even in the case of a release” began to appear in contracts, and as the landowning class took political power, the releases themselves just dried up. The image of the king changes from “just administrator Hammurabi” to “great warrior Rammeses”.

This is all somehow similar to Marx’s description of the accumulation of capital in late-Renaissance Europe, but in this situation, the beleaguered worker had access to a kind of escape, in what I’d tentatively call the tension between (3) city and mountain. Interestingly, city-dwelling Mesopotamians and Hittites traditionally saw pastoral mountain folk as Other and thought about the state as engaged in keeping them out, with the Ur III king Shulgi going so far as to wall off a section of the Euphrates against the foe Amorites. As Liverani points out, the situation was probably more complicated than royal propaganda could say, and it’s likely that the shepherds moved seasonally between the cities and the mountains. So, as economic conditions in the cities became unbearable, the landless sometimes had the opportunity to just give up and go to the mountains or wilderness.

It’s here that we see the Amarna letters’ mysterious habiru, who are presented by the worried governors of Egypt-ruled Syria as an enemy everywhere and nowhere, not allied with Babylonia or Hatti but capable of suddenly breaking entire cities out of Egyptian rule. The habiru were likely (3) wilderness people with a tentative connection to their former cities, from which they had (2) fled debt slavery; while the governors, our only source of documentary data, wrote from the point of view of (1) the global landowning class, whose interests they had to spend time and resources in defending. In particular, they had to (1) maintain the cities’ already low productive power, so that (2) the laborers had to be prevented from leaving. So they started to write international treaties with more and more detailed clauses about (3) the return of fugitives...

So when the Sea Peoples show up circa 1200, what they find is bronze suit with no body inside. The great armies of Egypt are stretched thin enough keeping Syria paying tribute and the Egyptians inside. The Hittite nobility is busy fighting about the royal succession, while its economy has basically stopped growing due to labor attrition, and its own mountain peoples are massing around its borders. In many places, there was probably very little other than force actually keeping society together. People start to leave and other people start to enter. The trade routes stop moving, and the supply of copper and tin. It turns out, though, that anyone can smelt iron.

#late bronze age collapse #ancient near east #egypt #sea peoples #marxism #mario liverani

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