A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

When TIME's Los Angeles correspondent Denise Worrell viewed Platoon, a film that batters its audience with the brutalities of the Viet Nam War, her reaction was immediate: "It was my father's face I saw on the screen. Barely 18, in a swell of patriotism, he had enlisted in the Marines. He could never talk about fighting the Japanese during World War II, and I sensed that part of him was scar tissue. Platoon gave me my father's war. That war and Viet Nam were supposed to be very different, but this film showed that every war, for the man in the trenches with a rifle, is the same."

Her enthusiasm for the film, coupled with the knowledge of its outstanding reviews and mounting grosses, prompted her to speed a message to TIME editors in New York City, which resulted in this week's cover story.

Senior Writer and Cinema Critic Richard Corliss, who wrote the main story about Platoon, which was directed by Oliver Stone, notes, "In 1967 Stone and I were both preparing for this cover story. He was dodging enemy fire in Southeast Asia, and I was taking graduate film courses at Columbia and N.Y.U. Of course, even in the academic cocoon, everyone's major was Viet Nam, but for us, it was on TV. Stone's achievement is to rescue this huge national tragedy from the 19-inch screen and put it on the big one, where it belongs."

In Los Angeles, Bureau Chief Dan Goodgame produced an accompanying story on retired Marine Corps Captain Dale Dye, who was the film's technical adviser. The two had met in 1982: Goodgame was covering the Middle East for the Miami Herald, while Dye was assigned to the Marine detachment that was ravaged by a terrorist bombing in October 1983. "Dale was an unabashed war junkie and always had a strong interest in movies about combat," Goodgame remembers. "Even then he was critical of inauthentic films like Apocalypse Now."

The stories were written with reports from Reporter-Researcher Elizabeth Bland in New York and Worrell and TIME Correspondent Elaine Dutka in Los Angeles. Dutka, who majored in political science and modern history during the peak Viet Nam War years, recalls that era as the "beginning of my real political education, a crucial rite of passage." While viewing Platoon, she was struck by the reaction of veterans around her. "One man told me afterward that it was a relief to be able to share the nightmare he had lived and has yet to shake." Platoon is a riveting movie, and our cover story tries to capture that intensity.