Vietnam Trilogy



      Martin Sheen -- Apocalypse Now


      "Working on that movie was the roughest thing I ever did in my life, both physically and emotionally," Sheen told a Family Weekly reporter. "I always had some illness or another, and until the last six weeks of shooting, we never knew when we were going to finish the film." And then it happened: Late one night he was in his cabin in the mountains when he was awakened by a burning pain in his chest. By morning the pain had increased, and Martin felt dizzy and faint. He almost passed out. Rolling onto the floor, he dressed himself, then crawled on his hands and knees down a dirt path to the road where a guard gathered him up and carried him to the set. From there, a helicopter flew him through heavy winds to Manila. It was March 5, 1977. "I was having a heart attack, and I ended up in the hospital," Martin said simply. "But the experience changed my life."


      Emilio Estevez -- The War At Home


      "For some reason," says Estevez, "my family has found itself drawn to the Vietnam subject matter: My father with Apocalypse Now, Charlie (Sheen) with Platoon, and now me with The War At Home." He's really not all that surprised. His father was active in the '60s anti-war movement, "and I grew up watching the war on the six o'clock news," says the 34 year old. Estevez "opened up" the play with a voice-over narration. He skipped the expense of computer-generated special effects and staged the son's vivid war flashbacks theater-style in the family's back yard. "We shot those at night," Estevez says. "I tried to create parallel realities, because he has one foot in Vietnam and one foot in Texas at all times. By the end, it's all blurred." "It's the best stuff in the movie," Sheen pronounces. "For me, Vietnam was a metaphor. If he had come home and said he was gay or a substance abuser, it would have been the same. It's a dysfunctional family in crisis, and this is the price you pay when you fail to communicate."



      Charles Sheen -- Platoon


      When Charlie stepped from the plane, he immediately recognized the "mildew scent" of the jungle he had known ten years earlier, back when he joined his father during the filming of Apocolypse Now. "I got hit in the face with that odor -- this weird and powerful smell like burning rubber and malaria and poverty and rot.... The whole thing was a strange homecoming, just like walking back into a bad dream all over again," he told reporter Elvis Mitchell. In that original bad dream, Charlie was more the observer of tragedy than he was first hand victim. This time around, Charlie would be the star of his own nightmare. Along with the jungle stench, Charlie would learn the true meaning of blood, sweat, and tears, that would be indelibly stamped in his memory.
      Each day the actors were kept busy from 5:30 in the morning until late at night with classes on M-16 automatic rifle setup and breakdown, squad radio procedures, calisthenics, and the much dreaded full-gear patrols -- including several 18km uphill-downhill backbreakers. All of this in the 100-degree heat, drenching humidity, sticky dusty dirt, swarms of red ants, and "students" at the point of exhaustion. War is hell, and the cast soon learned that making this movie would be hell, too.