Welcome guys to Behind the Shield, my name is James Geering and this is episode 35.
And my next guest is a man who I actually worked with about 15 years ago in Japan.
I was hired as a stuntman to do the Terminator 2 show and a white haired gentleman beat the
crap out of us for three days on an island in Osaka.
That gentleman was Captain Dale Dye and it wasn't until I discovered who he was that
I realized how privileged we were out there.
Captain Dye is the man behind the training of the cast of Platoon, Save and Private Ryan
and Band of Brothers and he also has been in numerous Hollywood productions himself.
He was originally a Marine, Captain in the Marine Corps and the interview is incredible.
We cross everywhere from his actual time in the service through to how he got into Hollywood,
why he got into Hollywood and some of the stories from these amazing projects and the
three that I have named are probably my three favorite movies that have anything to do with
military whatsoever.
So what I want to do in this intro though before we get into the interview is just reiterate
a project that he talks about.
He is going to be crowd sourcing or crowdfunding I think the word is, his latest project No
Better Place to Die.
This is the story of the D-Day landing on Normandy and his goal is to use as many veterans
as he can in the production and he wants to fund it himself so that way he is free from
some of the restraints of the studio money.
So after you listen to this incredible interview I want you guys to go to the links that we
have on the website and delve in and see if there is any way you can help.
I know we have a lot of people listening that are veterans themselves so really spread the
word and really help me help Dale share this project.
He was very very generous with his time on this podcast and I really want to repay the
favor and help be part of the solution and spread the word and help him with the funding
of this movie.
Based on the ones he has been involved with so far this will be the inception of yet another
incredible military movie that really will pay homage to the guys that truly truly lay
down their lives for our freedom.
So that being said I was amazed at this interview.
It blew my mind that the man that I was sitting in a bar with in Osaka 15 years ago was now
in the end of the microphone in a completely different capacity and I think that you guys
are going to love this interview.
Again share the hell out of it, rate us on iTunes, just let's help get this story out
and the other episodes are phenomenal as well so any of the ones that you have, the favorite
episodes please share them but this one specifically I really want people to take the extra time
and think about anyone and anywhere you can share this and let's help Captain Dai get
this project off the ground.
So without further ado I introduce to you Captain Dale Dai.
Enjoy.
Welcome Captain Dai to Behind the Shield.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing terrific and thanks for having me here.
I think I'm talking to kindred spirits and that's always a pleasure.
Obviously you are and I'm going to delve into this later but I can't believe that I'm talking
to you now 15 years later as a firefighter when I was an actor slash stuntman when we
last met so it's been a hell of a journey for both of us I'm sure.
Yeah, you've come a long way.
It's been interesting.
Alright so I'm pretty sure I don't need to paint a picture for a lot of people as to
who you are but I certainly would like to delve into your background a little bit and
then get to obviously where you got to the military and then further on into your Hollywood
journey so where were you born and what was your family unit like?
Well I'm an only child of a mom and dad.
I grew up in southeast Missouri.
The way I say that should indicate that it's the southern part of the state and I had a
fairly good family.
It got a little fractured.
We had some drinking problems in the family and as a result I kind of became a little
I guess I became I was an imaginative kid and I was fascinated by all things military
or what I perceived to be all things military and as a consequence while my family tried
to hash out their own personal relations I was sent away to military schools so from
about the fifth grade through the end of high school I attended military schools primarily
Missouri Military Academy in the northern part of the state.
Okay, did you have military family?
Yes, but they were all nobody was a professional at it.
They were all World War II guys and they went wherever the draft sent them or wherever they
volunteered to go and it was fairly common family lash up I get.
People went to war during World War II or were drafted to go to war during World War
II and they came home and forgot all about it to the extent that they could and got on
with their lives.
So I didn't have anybody that was kind of a touchstone or a figure that said the military
is a great career that all came from inside me.
So when you graduated from military school you had your sights set on Annapolis is that
right?
I did, yeah.
I desperately wanted to go to the United States Naval Academy because I just thought that
was the great stepping stone and I would then become Admiral Dye at some point in my career.
But I had played too many sports and screwed around too much so my grades weren't sufficient.
I took the competitive exams and failed them not once but three times and so it became
clear to me that the Naval Academy didn't need me, thank you very much Dale Dye.
And so at that point I looked around and said you know what are you going to do here?
What's going to happen?
And there wasn't enough money to go to college.
We were broke from spending everything we had to send me to military schools and there
weren't a lot of scholarships out there as there is now, not a lot of government money
or anything like that.
So you had to work your way through and I just couldn't afford to do anything and it
was really a low point in my life.
And this was November, it was the fall of 1963 and in November of that year President
Kennedy was assassinated.
Now the link here is that while I was a military school cadet, I was a cadet officer and I
marched in President Kennedy's inauguration parade in Washington.
The unit from Missouri Military Academy was brought up to march in the parade.
I was a member of that unit.
And I remembered the impact of Kennedy's inaugural speech in which he said among many other things,
he said, ask not what you can do for your country, ask not what your country can do
for you, ask what you can do for your country.
And that had always stuck with me.
Well, at this low point in the fall of 1963 when I really didn't know what I was going
to do, there didn't seem to be any options out there, I still had that flag-waving adventure,
grass is greener on the other side of the hill spirit in me.
And I thought, you know, maybe President Kennedy, God bless him, was right.
I should ask what I can do for my country.
And I was walking down Pine Street in St. Louis, Missouri at one point with snow falling
and I was cold and miserable and didn't seem to have any future.
And I saw this poster and it had a picture of a Marine in dress blue uniform and he was
beautiful.
He was the rock.
And I looked at it and the wording said, Marines, are you ready?
And I said, you know, by God, I think I am.
So I went in and I didn't look at the Army, I didn't look at the Navy, I didn't look
at the Air Force, I went right to the Marine recruiter and I said, send me, send me.
And he signed me up and I was on my way to basic training boot camp in the third day
of January 1964.
That's the beginning of it all.
Wow.
Yeah, it's funny how that phrase, when the student is ready, the master will appear and
you know, you're knocking on one career and thinking, that's going to be it.
And then a moment of clarity hits and you realize that you're on the wrong path all
along.
That's very Buddhist of you, Gearing.
But I think you're right.
Well, I just wanted to reel back for a second.
Did you not play an Admiral in Steven Seagal's film Under Siege?
I did.
In fact, two of them, the Under Siege and then a sequel, I played a Navy Admiral and
it, believe me, the irony did not escape me.
All right.
So then let me see here.
So I guess a very important question then.
So right now you're a raw recruit, so you've spent your life giving boot camps to other
people, whether it's in the military or then certainly these actors that we'll get to later
in the podcast.
But what was your initial experience of your own boot camp?
Well, Marine boot camp in those days, and this is 1964, the very beginning of 1964, was
a tough road to hoe.
Not that it isn't now, but it was different in character.
It was very physical and very focused.
And I ate it like pudding.
I mean, I loved it.
It reflected on the training that I'd had in military school.
It provided me a focus and got me out of myself, got me, you know, made me quit crying the
poor ass and thinking, woe is me.
And it really gave me something to look for.
So despite, you know, the depredations of Marine drill instructors, and everybody's
heard those stories or seen Full Metal Jacket, it was like that.
I managed to graduate with honors and I chose to go the infantry route.
I had high scores in various other things relative to the other guys in my platoon and
my recruit platoon.
And so I probably could have, you know, gotten electronics technician or communicator or
something like that.
That didn't seem the right thing.
The right thing seemed to be to go to the heart of the Marine Corps, which was the infantry.
And so I begged and wheedled and got myself assigned there.
So then I went to Camp Pendleton, California, here on the West Coast, and joined a unit
to learn to be an 81-millimeter mortarman.
I did that for about a year, a year and a half, I guess.
And I frankly became bored.
I have this really low tolerance for boredom.
Once I had learned all they expected of a private first class or a Lance Corporal at
that point, I wanted to do something more.
I knew there was a huge facet of the Marine Corps in aviation and armor and all the other
things that the Marine Corps does and does so well.
And I wanted to see that.
I wanted to be part of that.
But I couldn't figure out how to do it.
And then one day, once again, the master shows up when you need him.
And I met a guy, a sergeant in the Marine Corps, who was out among us with a camera
around his neck.
And he was marching right along with us and humping right along with us and doing everything
else.
I looked at him and I said, who the hell are you?
What do you do?
And he said, well, I'm a Marine Corps combat correspondent.
And I said, what's that?
And he said, look, it is the biggest deal, unknown and hidden, that the Marine Corps
has.
And here's why.
You can do anything in the world that the Marine Corps does on the guise of writing
a little story and taking a few pictures about it, which will appear and be released to civilian
media and will appear in Marine Corps publications.
And you can do anything.
You can go anywhere as long as you've got that talent to wordsmith, to tell a little
story.
Well, I've been, I mean, as a legacy of my father, I've always been a storyteller.
And I loved the business of communicating and talking to people and seeing their reactions.
And so I said, you know, I think this may be the answer that I'm looking for.
And so despite harassment and depredations of various kinds, I managed to change what's
called my MOS, or my military occupational specialty, and became a Marine Corps combat
correspondent.
And the only basis for that, really, was the fact that I had edited my high school newspaper
when I was in military school.
That was sufficient in those days in the Marine Corps.
So I became a Marine Corps combat correspondent, and it really did pay off the way the sergeant
promised me.
I was able to go anywhere and practically do anything.
And I really got a big look.
I got a macro look at who the Marine Corps is, who Marines are, what the Marine Corps
is.
And that was the answer.
Right then I knew, OK, if I can stay in this groove, and every time I get bored, I can
jump off and fly in a helicopter.
I can go over here and shove 105 millimeter howitzer rounds in an artillery piece.
If I can just stay there, I'm cool.
And it went that way.
It was really, really good.
And then suddenly I got this set of orders that said, at that point, I think sergeant
die.
You will report to Marine Forces Western Pacific Fleet Marine Force Pacific.
And it didn't say, but we all knew where that was, and that was Vietnam.
And am I right in thinking that you were one of the very first units that was sent over
there?
No.
There was a full division over there at the point I went in, and I joined the next division
to go in, which was the 1st Marine Division.
The 3rd Marine Division had already been there, but I joined the 1st Marine Division.
Right.
Now, I just wanted to reel back for a second.
So when you were in boot camp, obviously you saw a smorgasbord of, I guess, mental and
physical ability.
You, unlike many periods of the armed services, you actually got to see not just one war,
but two conflicts.
At that point, what was your observation of how well your peers had performed in boot
camp versus how well they performed in actual combat?
Well, I guess like any recruit training platoon, regardless of the service, you got some winners
and you got some losers, and the losers are always going to tag a little behind.
And certainly that was my case.
I tried to be up among the leaders because that was the best way to survive.
But I saw in the building of us as Marines, I saw that eternal warrior spirit that says
and teaches you and preaches that it's not about you, it's about the mission, it's about
the survival of the unit, and it's about the guy on your left and the guy on your right.
And I recognized that.
I saw that bigger picture.
And when I got to Vietnam, I saw it play out.
The interesting thing about war or being involved in combat operations is that you can see the
full gamut of human behavior and human emotions from the absolute worst to the very, very
best.
And I observed that and I saw it.
And I like to think, in fact, I know that the majority of the Marine units I ran with
had that spirit instilled in them from the time that they graduated from boot camp.
And it held.
And it held in the face of enormous adversity in extremis.
That spark and that spirit, which the drone instructors had instilled, was always still
there.
It got shaded here and it got shaded there, but it was always there.
And the nut-cutting came.
These guys would get up and go, even at the risk of their lives.
And I saw that many, many, many times.
Right.
I've noticed a common denominator as well.
I've interviewed Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Delta Force.
And in some of their worst-case stories, often when they've lost brothers out there, it seems
like almost every single story, they take a moment and say, we were assigned to ex-Marine
unit and they were some of the most courageous men that we've ever fought alongside.
Yeah.
We build them in a strange fashion.
But what we recognize and what I wish, in many cases, other services would realize is
that if you can locate and keep hammering, keep teaching that eternal warrior spirit,
that selflessness, that self-sacrifice, you're going to build people who will tear down walls
for you, who will run through the walls and get it done.
And I think that's what the SEALs that you talk to and the Green Berets that you talk
to and everything else, they recognize that.
And now I grant you, they call us knuckle-draggers and note-fippers.
I get that.
And guilty as charged in some cases.
The Marine Corps philosophy is primarily, hey, diddle, diddle, right up the middle,
fix bayonets and the hell with the consequences.
We have a reputation in that regard.
It's not true, but it's fun to laugh about.
And I think that other services, special operators, the high-speed, low-drag guys, they recognize
that.
And they recognize that it goes all the way down to Rudy in the rear rank with a rusty
rifle.
I mean, it's not just a guy who's volunteered four times and been through all the high-speed
training in the world.
In the Marine Corps, it's right down to that guy with a rusty bayonet and not much else
going on, but he's going to do it.
And that's the spirit, I think, that I admire so much.
And what is it in the training?
What is it in the boot camp and that journey that Marines go through that creates this
mindset in these men and women?
You have to educate me for a moment.
Are there women Marines now?
Yes, there are.
Okay, so I want to make sure I cover male and female.
Okay, so these men and women, male and female Marines, what is it that creates that?
What's that strength and that courage in the mindset?
I think it's an understanding of an appreciation for our heritage, our legacy, James.
Unlike many of the other services, we don't just offer a Marine Corps history class.
We live it.
And we revisit it constantly.
And we demand that Marines study it.
And what that does is it imbues in the individual Marine a sense that he is a link in a long,
long, long chain, and that the worst thing he can do or she can do is to do something
that breaks that chain, that rusts that chain, that diminishes that legacy.
And it really works.
I mean, we carry that.
I carry it to this day.
I carry an awareness that I am the legacy, I am the heritage of Marines who went before
me and did fantastic things all the way back to the birth of our nation.
Now, that's not to say that the Navy, the Army, the Air Force didn't do absolutely fantastic
things also.
They did.
But we preach it, live it, and make sure that every Marine is constantly aware of it.
And I think that's really the difference.
Right.
I think there's a movement to plant that back into, I mean, the fire service, I can say,
I'm sure, law enforcement as well.
But there are some, you know, very many men and women that have never lost that in the
fire service.
But as technology has advanced and politics have come in, that's been threatened a little
bit.
And I think it is.
It is, James.
And I don't mean to interrupt you, but I have thought about this.
I've thought about this.
I've thought about, you know, look, if I am a police officer or a firefighter in St. Louis,
Missouri, or in Melbourne, Australia, my heritage and legacy is the ancient volunteer fire services
in Melbourne or the Keystone Cops sort of block patrols as a policeman in St. Louis.
There is a, and that's fine, and it works in that smaller context, in that community
context.
What I'm advocating and what I'm admiring is the larger devotion to the nation, not
just to the neighborhood in Melbourne or the neighborhood in St. Louis, a larger devotion
to the nation.
And I think we have diminished firefighters and policemen, firefighters and policemen's
view of that.
They become colloquial.
They become localized.
That's understandable.
Their responsibility is safeguarding that community.
I understand.
But there's a larger heritage.
It's the heritage of every volunteer fireman everywhere in the world who has rushed to
save lives and property.
It's the heritage of every police officer who's run down a wild shooter or a traffic
speeder that's potentially killing lives or taking lives.
That are put lives at risk.
I'll get this right in a minute.
The point is that I think that larger picture is something we've lost, especially among
policemen and firefighters.
I get why, but I think we'd be well served to return to the fact that I'm not only a
police officer for Clayton County, Missouri, or I'm not only a firefighter for North Melbourne.
I am part of the system, the mechanism that keeps the citizens of the world safe.
This just happens to be my little part of the patch.
I think we'd be better to go back to that realization and to preach it and to teach
it.
Yeah.
And I think that's exactly how I see it.
My dad tried to get me to go in the army as a PTI, physical training instructor, back
in England.
At the time when I was growing up, the Falklands Islands war was happening.
Even to my very young mind, it seemed I couldn't get my head around why so many people died
for a rock covered in penguins to simplify it, oversimplify it.
Had you been taught correctly, you would have seen that.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
I knew I had a calling and I went through a very winding career path.
I was a lifeguard for a while, which was serving.
But then when you and I met, I was in the stunt industry and I found that very unfulfilling.
I was good at it to a point.
I wouldn't say I was a good actor, but the physical stuff, the fighting and everything
was good.
But I was so unfulfilled.
You were always a very good faller.
You fell well.
I pride myself on my falling.
But when I became a fireman, that was my calling.
I realized that that was what I was supposed to contribute to my nation.
My nation happened to be the US by that point, but I wasn't supposed to be a soldier.
I was supposed to be a soldier within the country and protect the men and women against
fire, against car crashes, against all these other things that we mitigate in the fire
service.
So I agree 100%.
We are part of this big jigsaw puzzle.
I think that's the same view as how I regard the kind of the political mess is the wrong
word.
But the way that people look at politics is they look into this one person at the top
to change the country instead of realizing that they are the ones that can change the
country.
And if every fireman and policeman in their community does their job well, the country's
going to be great.
And everyone else does their part too.
James, you've almost hit it.
And what I'm perceiving, you know, I travel a lot.
I'm all over this nation, all over the world, as a matter of fact.
And here's what I'm perceiving.
And all you have to do is open-mindedly watch the news.
And you'll see what I perceive as a public groundswell, a groundswell from the previously
ignored people of this nation and several other nations.
England and the United States or UK and the United States are the most obvious and publicized
examples.
But what's happening here is that folks are saying, you know, enough of this crapola,
enough of this.
I am the nation.
I am the heartland.
I am the government.
I am the person that our government, regardless of whether it's UK or US, I am the person
that our government is designed to serve.
And I'm going to demand that it serve me.
We're seeing that.
I think our most recent election in the United States is a classic example of it.
And I think what's happening in UK and France right now as a result of recent terrorist
attacks is a classic example of that.
People are saying, this is my country, my responsibility.
I'm going to stand up and do something about it.
And that's marvelous.
I think what you're going to see, if I were to predict, and here I am predicting, I think
you're going to see a great groundswell of support for police and firemen, first responders
of all types, because the nation is saying, look, I get it.
These guys are selfless.
And it's about time we've got, we appreciate and celebrate a little selflessness.
And you guys are going to be the benefactors of that.
Yeah, well, I think it's a double-edged sword as well.
And part of my whole reason for doing this podcast is to take care of my fellow first
responders.
But the other part is to create ownership in the fact that if you are in this role,
you also have to rise to the level of training and expectation that this job requires.
So when, excuse my language, but when the shit hits the fan, you sure as hell better
be ready to perform whatever duty that you have been recruited to do.
Yes indeed, and you know, you know, at least I tried to teach you that there is what really
counts in that instance when the shit does hit the fan, or as we say as an officer, when
the defecation hits the oscillation.
It's at that moment when training counts less than motivation.
Sure you've got to know how to use an OBA and you've got to know to crawl instead of
walk into smoke-filled rooms and so on and so forth.
You have to know all of those things, but that becomes muscle memory.
What's really key and crucial in those moments is motivation.
I need to do this because it is my duty, not because I get paid to do it.
And that's where you've got to go.
That's where first responders around the world have to go.
It cannot, it must not be just a job.
If it's just a job, you're going to screw it up and people are going to die because
you're unwilling to take that risk when the shit hits the fan.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Well, I want to kind of take that and bring it back to your combat experience.
So obviously one of the problems that we have is fear.
And I'm not talking about pulling up to a raging house fire and being scared to go in,
but also just fear of looking in the mirror and realizing that you haven't trained as
much as you should and kind of shying away instead of stepping up and saying today is
the day.
So how did you, again, coming from bootcamp, but not seeing combat, how did you combat
the fear when you actually saw combat for the first time and then in your career as
well?
Fear can be a tool and it should be.
I don't know anybody who faces life-threatening situations, whether it's a policeman, a firefighter,
a first responder of any sort, or a military man or woman on the battlefield.
You realize very quickly that it's way, way too damn easy to die here.
And usually you've got reasons to live or you wouldn't be there.
And so you learn to use, in my case, you learn to use fear as a tool.
You must learn to control it.
That takes a certain amount of psychological courage more than it does physical courage.
The key is not to let fear own you.
You've got to own it.
And if you own it, it becomes a real tool.
It becomes something that teaches you.
When you survive a situation where your life is on the line, and certainly this was the
case with me, if you're not a complete dumbass, you're going to learn how you did that.
Or you're going to see how other people did it.
And you're going to think about it a little bit.
At least you should.
And you're going to see that the people that you admired and who did those wonderful things
against all odds in combat or in this raging four-story fire or against barricaded hostage
situation, you're going to see that those people were afraid, naturally.
They'd be inhuman if they weren't.
But they have managed to conquer it.
They've managed to live with that fear.
They've managed to use the fear as a tool.
I don't think I've ever met, nor would I want to meet, certainly not fight with, a human
being who was completely absent fear.
That's unnatural and frankly insane.
We're all born with a desire to live and save our lives, and so we all feel fear.
But fear needs to be a tool.
It needs to be something that we learn about ourselves.
We learn about life.
We learn about a bigger picture that can mute that fear because we know there is a mission
to be done and it must be done.
You must use fear as a tool.
And I don't know how this is going to sound, but you must not be afraid of fear.
Fear is natural.
Fear is there.
The key is you need to be the guy who doesn't show it.
If you can do that, despite feeling it raging throughout your body and screaming for survival,
if you can do that, you will survive and you will learn from that fear.
Okay, yeah, that reminds me a lot of boxers or MMA fighters.
When you watch them in the ring or in the cage, they're like, how are they so calm?
And then you hear interviews after.
It's like, well, it's just a pretending game.
I'm acting.
I'm actually terrified inside, but it's whoever plays their role best usually out-sikes the
opponent.
Yeah, I've always said, and I still believe, that professional soldiers are among the world's
greatest actors and serving in extremis in wartime is the best acting school there is
if you do it well.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Now speaking of fear, again, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I want to make sure my facts are correct.
So you're a recipient of three purple hearts, which means that you were wounded in combat.
The enemy marksman ship badge.
So that obviously means that you returned to combat at least two or three times having
had a near career ending injury.
So, let's clarify some points.
Please.
You're injured in a car accident or when you fall off a bar stool.
In combat, you're wounded.
Okay.
And that's an important distinction.
All right, go ahead.
You may now carry on.
Civilian mistake.
I apologize.
All right.
So you're wounded in combat.
My big point I want to make is obviously you're taken away from the battleground for a while.
What was it inside you that drove you to get back each time having been wounded in combat?
I think it was, there were two things.
There was a personal thing and there was a larger psychological issue, I guess.
The personal thing was, look, I'm in the military for the long run.
I've got to learn to live with this.
I've got to learn to live with being wounded.
As the price you pay, it's the cost of doing business.
Assuming you don't get a leg blown off or get killed.
So you need to get back on that horse that threw you.
And I knew that if I didn't do that, fear would conquer me.
And I couldn't have that.
And there was a larger issue, I guess this is the second issue, James, to try to answer
your question.
I knew that there were people out there who needed me, who had relied on me.
And the jeopardy that they faced would be worse were I not there or were I to take the
opportunity to just say, okay, I'm through, I've been hit, I'm going to go over here and
go back to the States and serve at Camp Pendleton or something.
So those were the things that were on my mind.
And I'm awfully glad that I responded that way.
Yeah, that ties in very, very directly to kind of what we're fighting at the moment
with physical and mental injuries with the PTSD that we're seeing and some first responders
is, I think we're fighting a battle, especially with the mental stuff, to get it recognized
by some of these entities that we work for.
However, on the flip side, as an individual and the ownership side, I think we need to
recognize as first responders that the goal is to take time off, if given the time to
recover to here, whether it's a physical traumatic injury or a mental injury.
But then the ultimate goal is exactly like you said, to get back out there and stand
alongside your brothers and sisters and perform your duties until you retire.
PTSD is too easy.
And it has become an industry.
I object to it.
I think I certainly grant and admit and have experienced post-traumatic stress.
But I think the strong individual handles it and understands it.
And that may take some group therapy or it may take some explaining or understanding,
but we cannot allow it to become the cash cow cop out that it has become right now.
We cannot allow the first police officer who busts a couple of caps at a criminal who's
busting caps back at him to suddenly quit and say, you know, I'm now so mentally stressed
by the firefight that I was in that I'm going to go on hiatus.
Not sure what it's called in police forces.
And I'm going to get treatment and I'm going to draw my full pay or I'm going to retire
immediately because here's an opportunity to do so.
That's not character.
And if there's one solid benefit of a traumatic experience or repetitive traumatic experiences,
it's that it can and should build character.
Right.
Yeah.
And there's definitely a correlation as well between, I think, the mental health of first
responders and the shift work and the sleep deprivation they're exposed to as opposed
to predominantly what they see.
And I think that there's a term they use now called post-traumatic growth, which is exactly
what you're talking about.
They have an incident, they get treatment and they come back stronger than they were
before, the resiliency.
Well, you know, people, I can hear your audience screaming right now, easier said than done,
die, easier said than done.
I went through it.
So I get it.
I am empathetic.
But here's the thing.
If you will fight it, if you will understand it and thereby deal with it effectively, it
will increase your motivation.
It will give you an understanding of why you put yourself in that particular situation.
And you did.
You volunteered to be a firefighter.
You volunteered to be a soldier.
You volunteered to be a cop.
So those things kind of go with the territory.
And you have to understand it.
You have to deal with it.
And you deal with it by understanding that macro picture motivation.
I'm here to help.
I'm here to save lives.
In short, it ain't about me.
It's about the good of my community, the safety of its citizens, the safety of my nation or
the survival of my nation.
That's what you've got to do.
That's where you've got to go when you're fighting this traumatic experience.
You've got to say, look, this is part and parcel of my chosen lifestyle, my chosen way
of life, my chosen profession.
It is something that happens.
It is something that I can be strong enough to deal with.
I must deal with it because the neighborhood, the nation, the county, the state relies on
me to do this.
I must not cop out.
I must find that motivation again.
That's how you deal with PTSD.
Right.
And I want to clarify, not clarify, but focus on one moment when I think it was the last
time I saw you actually, we finished the boot camp and we'll talk about that in a little
bit.
And we went to a bar, I don't know if you remember, in Osaka, Japan.
Me a bar?
We may have been a little drunk, but we started talking about, and it was very brief, but
we talked, I think I'd asked you, had you taken a life and I'm sure now looking back,
the worst thing you can ask a fireman is what's the worst thing you've ever seen?
And I'm sure the worst thing you can ask a soldier is tell me about your experience
killing.
But I remember you saying that you'd taken one life with a knife.
Now I had Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman on the show a few episodes ago.
Great guy, Dave.
Yeah, that was phenomenal interview.
But one of his things was the most traumatic thing a soldier can do is to take a life at
that close combat with a knife.
That was the worst.
So for you to have done that yourself, I'm just putting you on that.
In that place where in his philosophy, in his teachings, that is the most vivid and
I guess most mentally traumatic of combat experiences.
And like you said, you managed to get through that.
Yeah, it's, look, when the killing is done at a range where you can smell the other guy's
breath and you see the stark terror in his eyes that is obviously reflected in yours,
as Dave Grossman says, and God bless him, that is a guy who really understands the soldier's
heart, the spirit of the warrior.
I've read everything Dave has written and lived by it.
He's got wonderful insights.
So if you haven't read On Killing and that sort of thing by Dave Grossman, get it and
read it.
But he's correct.
Those traumas, the experience of having to take a life, look, what I remember most about
it was that it didn't bother me at the time.
It bothered me about two days later when I was laying on a poncho looking up through
a triple canopy jungle at the stars.
And I don't know exactly what prompted it, but it was at that point I had this huge moral
crisis.
Like a lot of people, I'd grown up in a sort of Judeo-Christian upbringing and the big
mortal sin is thou shalt not kill.
And when you're involved in shooting at the other guy or fighting with the other guy and
he's fighting with you, you can write it off to survival.
I had to do that or I would have been dead myself.
And that works for a little while.
But suddenly the old Sunday school and church teachings start coming back, assuming you've
had Sunday school and church and that sort of thing.
Too many people don't these days.
But when you start reflecting on that, you say, oh my God, I am doomed.
I have taken another life.
I've committed the most mortal of sins and I'm condemned to hell for when I die.
And that could be tomorrow.
So when you get into that area, it is really difficult.
That's when your strength of mind, your ability to reason with yourself and not rationalize,
just face it and give yourself that solid stern talking to that says, look, wake up,
realize what the real world is about.
Here it is.
You did this and you had to do it.
And it was you or him.
Fortunately for you, it was him.
And you've got to learn to live with that.
So those were my experiences.
And I was able to fight my way through it.
I was able to rationalize sufficiently for mental stability what had happened.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously as a fireman, I have no concept of what that was like.
But it kind of struck me again right before I was getting ready to interview you that
that whole conversation just kind of sprung back in my mind.
And it's funny 15 years later, I get to ask you about it again from a totally different
angle.
Well, it's funny with firefighters.
You know, I've spoken with a number of them, especially here in Los Angeles and Chicago
and Detroit and other big city areas.
And a lot of those guys, I don't know whether I should say this or not, and I'm not going
to name any names, but they go armed.
And they have to because when they're responding to the fire and so on and so forth, they'll
have gang members and, you know, bangers and so on and so forth.
People try to take them down.
And I've always thought that was an interesting and little known aspect of big city firefighting.
Yeah.
Well, another experience I've had as a fireman, I've worked in some pretty awful areas in
the West Coast and the East Coast, is that there's that threat of that, especially in
initiations.
You know, you kill a fireman and you get into the gang.
But the other side is certainly outside the gangs, is some of the most desperate people
in society, whether it's prostitutes or drug dealers or whatever.
Obviously, they're terrified of the police.
But when you roll down, especially in a rescue, like an ambulance that we ride in, you're
the only hope they've got.
So when you show up on scene, anyone else on the planet, they'd probably be robbing
or killing, but to you, we're the ones that are going to be saving them if it hits the
fan.
So it's a very weird experience.
You're talking about rational people there.
I'm not.
But I get it.
And you're the firefighter and I stand instructed.
Yeah, no, but I'm saying, but the guys in some of the other cities is probably a very
different experience.
I know in Anaheim, in California, when I worked there, you're scraping up 14, 15 year old
kids that have been shot in a park and there's no sense in protecting some apartment complex
that their parents rented that month.
I mean, there's no rational thinking behind that at all.
I get it.
So, all right.
Well, I want to make sure that we touch the second part of your career, which is obviously
how you got into Hollywood.
So what was it that made you want to finally retire from the military?
And then secondly, obviously, what was it that what was your goal for for trying to
get into Hollywood?
Well, look, I had been in Beirut, Lebanon, with the Marine Corps in 1982 and 83.
I was a captain at that point, having done 13 years enlisted and then gone to officer
candidate school.
And I could see the situation in Beirut by early 1983.
I could see it developing.
And I knew that if we didn't take a hand in this, if we didn't get rid of the political
considerations that were being put on by the State Department, some people were going to
get killed.
I mean, the shooting was already starting.
And so I left Beirut, I guess, in the summer of 83, and by the fall of 83, there was a
bombing that killed 250-some Marines.
And that really kind of broke my heart.
It kind of broke my warrior spirit for the time, despite adversity, despite my own combat
experiences, because I viewed it as unnecessary.
We shouldn't have been put in a situation and then had our hands tied and been restricted.
So I was really down.
I was really brokenhearted, because so many of those guys who died were good friends of
mine.
And I just saw it as we got betrayed.
We let the politicians direct what we should do on the battlefield, and that was deadly.
And of course, it had deadly consequences in October of 1983.
So I began to think, you know, maybe I'm not the guy I started out to be.
Maybe I'm not the guy who can wave his hand and say, follow me, Marines, it is necessary
for us to die.
That's who I'd always seen myself as.
And that kind of took some wind out of my sails.
And so I started to look around for something to do.
I had enough time in to retire.
And so I decided to do that, and I got a job with a publication called Soldier of Fortune
magazine, which supposedly was going to capitalize on my journalistic abilities.
But in actuality, what it turned out to be was going into Central America and training
the contra-revolutionary forces in El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
And so I was essentially back in uniform, if you will, and I was down there training
guerrilla forces.
And then along came Iran-Contra, and what we were doing kind of on the QT down there
suddenly became very public and pissed off Congress no end.
And so that work kind of fell out.
And I was really at a loss.
I mean, I had formally retired, didn't know what to do, and I really began to kind of
do a period of self-examination.
You know, what can I bring to the table?
I mean, I've been shot too many times to want to be a cop on America's main streets.
If I became a corporate cubicle rat, you know, I would have ended up on a bar stool or killed
myself in six months.
Me too.
Yeah.
Well, you know the drill.
And I couldn't stand the thought of being a defense contractor.
I'd seen the inside of that mess before.
And so I really needed to find something that would reward me, appeal to my creative side,
and allow me to, you know, make a little money and pay the bills.
And so I suddenly glommed onto the thought that, you know, I had been a movie fan all
my life.
I'd seen every military movie there was, I think, at that point.
And the common denominator was there that most of them pissed me off.
They just didn't reflect who we are, how we behave, how we talk, how we walk.
There were terrible, what I thought was misrepresentations.
Are you saying that John Wayne didn't capture the soldier's life?
No, John Wayne is always perfect.
I'm not talking about him.
I'm talking about the scripts he had to act.
In other words, the writers and the producers and the directors didn't get it.
And certainly the actors didn't get it.
And I began to wonder why.
So I just on a whim, really, I came out here to LA and I began to try to talk to people.
I began to try to find people, you know, on movie lot and started trying to circulate
and say, do you work in movies?
Tell me about it.
You know, and what I discovered was for years before I ever came on the scene, Hollywood
had had what they called technical advisors.
And I'm making little air quotes here.
And this was some guy, you know, usually who had done six months in the California National
Guard and he was the director's brother-in-law.
And they'd pay him $500 and sit him in a chair and wake him up whenever they wanted to know
which side the ribbons went on on his uniform.
But there was very little attempt.
I mean, those guys did an admirable job for what they were allowed to do, which is to,
you know, teach you how to wear the uniform, teach you how to carry and fire the weapon,
how to load it.
And that's fine.
But it is so superficial, so shallow.
What I thought was missing and what I was convinced was missing after a little investigation
was some way to train those actors and teach those producers and teach those directors
that what soldiers are really like and what they really do and how they really relate
to each other is more dramatic than anything someone who's never been in uniform can dream
up.
And so that was my pitch.
I said, look, what I want to do is take these actors and I want to immerse them in the world
of a combat soldier for as long as you'll let me.
And my promise is when I bring them down, they will understand the military.
They will understand the soldiers.
They will understand the emotions and the psychology and the relationships that form.
That was a tough sell.
You know, people told me, well, look, we've been making military movies for decades and,
you know, we don't need some clown like you coming in and telling us we're doing it all
wrong.
We've made zillions of dollars on these things.
Yeah.
But there was a way to do it better.
And there was a way to support my agenda.
My agenda was very simple to shine some long overdue and very much deserved light on the
men and women who wear our military uniform and what they do.
And so that was my agenda.
And I thought that, you know, given that we're a media saturated society and we're all nuts
over video and that sort of thing, it would be nice if I could get them to read history
books that say that.
But that's not going to happen.
So I took the mountain to Mohammed.
I said, I will I will go into the popular media and teach this and attempt to demonstrate
this very hard sell.
But I finally met a guy.
Well, actually, I found a guy who was going to do a movie about Vietnam based on his
own experiences as a combat infantryman in Vietnam.
Well, that was a rare bird in Hollywood, believe me.
And his name was Oliver Stone.
And I was able to get to him and do this pitch that I'm doing to you.
Tell him why I thought so many military movies, so many war movies didn't get to the heart
of the issue, didn't get to the heart of the matter.
Fortunately, based on his own personal experience, he understood it.
He said, you know, I think you're right.
And so he allowed me to take 33 actors, including some who are big names now and weren't then
Tom Berger, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Depp, take them all into a Charlie
Sheen, take them all into the jungles of the Philippines, the Philippine Mountains south
of Manoa and make them live for three weeks like Oliver and I lived as young 19 and 20
year olds in Vietnam.
It worked magically.
What I discovered was every evening I would have a stand down and this would be the time
when they could ask me questions.
And I was able to teach essentially philosophy, teach psychology, teach emotion, redefine
love.
And those things were what they what they really ate.
They ate it like breakfast pastry.
I mean, they got this stuff.
And when we brought them down out of the out of the mountains and we began to shoot this
little five million dollar picture, that's all we had called Platoon, it was I knew we
had caught lightning in a bottle.
And when we brought it home, it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director
from Olive for Oliver.
And he was kind enough at the Academy Awards to credit me with with much of the success
of the film.
And that was the real launch point of my career.
Yeah, anyone that's watched Platoon can can see with this the tension between Willem Dafoe
and Tom Berenger and their characters and then just the thousand yard stare and the
senselessness of so many of the combat scenes that it was completely different than any
war movie that certainly that I'd ever seen.
I was still somewhat young then.
But that's because the actors understood it.
Yeah, and weren't just mimicking.
They understood it.
No, and you could see that, absolutely.
And I think that that really just redefined what a war movie should be.
And I think you truly set the new baseline for everything that was made after that.
Well, I hope that's true, James.
I did some press interviews and I do them way too often, including this one.
But a writer here in L.A. said that Captain Dale Die literally changed the way Hollywood
makes war movies.
And I thought, well, if that's true, that'd be a great epitaph.
I'd be happy to have that on my gravestone.
Yeah, well, it's true.
I mean, if you ask me and I didn't know we'd never worked together and I didn't know you
were attached to any of these movies and you asked me name your three favorite war movies,
I'd tell you right now it'd be Platoon, Band of Brothers is a TV series, and then Saving
Private Ryan.
And you obviously were integral in all three of those productions.
I was.
I was very fortunate.
The neat thing is people like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and Bob Zemeckis and a number
of other great directors that I've worked with and who really taught me filmmaking,
some of the most creative people in the world.
They understood what I was trying to do and they realized its value.
So I've been exceedingly fortunate in that regard.
Yeah.
Now I played a firefighter once.
Oh, did you?
Which project was that?
Film, Steven Spielberg film called Always.
Oh, I was I was the fire boss.
And I never again want to wear fire gel and run through butane flames again.
But that's what I did.
There you go.
So I want to ask you about that.
So when you first came out of the military, obviously my experience with you was I was
at that point a civilian stuntman.
I think most of our cast was stunt performers and then we had some straight actors as well.
What was it like coming from working with soldiers to working with actors, which no
offense to my actor friends, I got many of them, but they're kind of a polar opposite.
You know, fundamentally, one wants the world to watch them and the other is putting their
life on the line for the world.
Yeah.
And I quickly realized that and I quickly realized the way to actors grow up in the
antithesis of how professional soldiers grow up.
I mean, actors think they're focused entirely on themselves.
They have to be.
The world, you know, the sun rises and sets on their ass.
And it's all about me, me, me and how many lines have I got and how's my hair.
Well, that's the antithesis of how a professional soldier looks at things.
What he thinks about are the mission, the survival of the unit and the survival of the
guys on the left.
The last thing he thinks about is himself.
And so that was really a dichotomy and I had to teach it and I had to more importantly,
and this is the reason my full immersion method works, I had to demonstrate it so that they
could see the difference.
And actors are kind of like dry sponges, you know.
You pour on the good stuff and they swell and they grow because they want to, especially
the good ones.
And so what I developed was, and anybody who's ever been in basic training or firefighter
training or a police academy knows what I'm talking about here, I began with PT, physical
training.
I wore their asses out.
And the reason I did that was to reduce them to a low common denominator so that everybody
was the same.
Nobody's special.
Everybody's going through the same pain, the same amount of sweat, the same amount of exertion
and effort.
And that takes a little bit of the wind out of their sails.
Suddenly they realize they're nobody special at all.
All they've got to do is find out how to, you know, find an effective way to avoid that
white haired bastard.
You know, I mean, that's, and once I've got them there, once I've got them listening and
paying attention and not thinking about themselves, then I can start to teach.
And what I found was the really good actors, the really dedicated actors ate it like candy.
They loved it.
They loved the experience.
They saw it as a learning experience.
It opened their eyes.
It gave them psychological and emotional insights, which are the tools they use in acting.
And they were great.
And I guess we've trained about 800 of them now.
The only, the downside is that occasionally you run into actors who aren't in it for the
art.
They aren't in it to be storytellers and to be communicators.
They're in it to be stars.
And those guys are a waste of time and space.
I can't train them because they'll lie to me.
And nothing I tell them will last more than the time it takes to listen.
Fortunately, there have been many, many fewer of those than there have been the serious
guys and gals who've listened and paid attention and learned.
Right.
Yeah.
I know, I mean, your whole platoon cast is phenomenal, but one that really stands out
to me is Johnny Depp.
Because if you want to, you want to talk about, I mean, you say about this yourself, you're
hired by Hollywood to be kind of to be Dale Die.
And then you have Johnny Depp, who's this chameleon that can be anything that's asked
of him.
Yeah.
He's, he's, he's pretty interesting.
He's a little, he's a little mimic.
And, and he gets these things and he's got the courage to try them and show them on screen.
And he does it from such an intelligent place.
He's, he's a very, very smart guy.
And he was one of the ones who really got what I was trying to teach when I had him
in the jungle in the Philippines.
Yeah.
That's a funny, I guess, loop around.
One of my fellow cast members in Terminator, and just for the people listening, where I
worked with Captain Die was the Terminator 2 stunt show in Universal Studios.
We opened one in Japan and Captain Die put us through a short, I would say probably pretty
gentle version of his boot camp.
But one of my fellow stuntmen, Damian Bryson, just doubled Johnny Depp for Pirates of the
Caribbean, this last movie he did.
Yeah, Damian, it's a great guy.
I remember, I remember all of you very well.
We did T2 3D themed entertainment where we taught the cast in Orlando, here in Hollywood,
and then in Osaka, Japan, which is the one you were involved in.
Yeah.
And your wife, Julia, was our director for the whole show.
She's the real drill instructor.
Yeah.
And I want to just talk about it very quickly.
I meant to put this earlier in the conversation.
But when I had Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman at the end of the interview, I asked him if
he recommended a book and one of his books that he recommended was Backbone by Your Wife.
Yeah, Julia, Julia worked enormously hard on that book.
And it is really, really an inside look at small unit leadership.
She stayed away from the officers and all that.
She went to corporals and Lance corporals and young sergeants and said, look, tell me about
leadership.
Give me some examples of what you did in the sandbox or on other deployments or back in
the States and how you became successful and how you view leading other people.
And they were just so anxious to talk to her about this.
It was not something they had ignored.
This was something they lived with.
This is something they paid attention to.
And they were so glad to talk to Julia because she was asking the low level, not even middle
managers.
These weren't senior NCOs.
These were the young NCOs, noncommissioned officers, who get it done, who do it from
day to day and who face all of those personal problems, personnel problems and leadership
problems.
And she came out with just a magic book.
Dave's a fan of it.
I'm a fan of it.
And it's called Backbone.
Yeah.
Well, I'll just reiterate that.
That's two episodes now that Backbone has been mentioned and I will definitely put it
on the show notes again.
But I haven't read it yet, but I will be reading it 100%.
As a firefighter, I haven't risen through the ranks because I keep moving departments
like a gypsy.
But I'm embedded now.
But I am one of those low level, and I don't mean that in a drugtree way, but I'm a fireman.
I'm not an officer at the moment.
But I like to think of myself as a leader in some respects as well.
So I think that would probably pertain to guys that haven't got a bunch of bugles on
their shirt yet that want to drive their department home.
Absolutely.
And you read it and if you pay attention, you'll pick up these little gems of low level
leadership that just work magic.
So read it.
Hurry up.
Yes, sir.
All right.
Okay, so I want to come back to Platoon just for a second.
Was there any kind of moments of being uncomfortable with what seems like the realism of the set
and the explosions that you guys had set?
Did that take you back to Vietnam at all when you were filming?
Yeah, it did.
I mean, there were moments where both Oliver and I, because we were the two actual combat
veterans on the set.
There were moments I can remember in the village scene where Lieutenant Wolfe and, or rather,
Sergeant Barnes and Sergeant Elias get in a fight.
The casting people had gone down to Manila.
We shot everything in the Philippines.
Had gone down to Manila and gotten real Vietnamese who had come into the Philippines as refugees
after Saigon fell, and cast them and brought them up to be the villagers.
They were right at home.
They knew all about this.
I remember we were trying to move them around and put them where they needed to be, and
they were gambling in Vietnamese, which is a very tonal language.
And Oliver and I, I mean, the hair just stood up on the back of my neck, and I looked at
Oliver and he looked at me, and we just stopped, and we walked off of the set, went over and
sat down on a rice paddy dike.
Didn't say anything.
We didn't have to.
We knew what it was.
All of that, just hearing that language, being surrounded by that language, just brought
it all back to us.
There were a lot of moments like that.
I can remember we were shooting a night scene, a night ambush, and the idea was that we had
fog in there, which frequently you see in triple canopy jungle, and two North Vietnamese
Army soldiers were to merge out of that fog.
Well, I'd been working 16, 18-hour days, and I was pretty exhausted, but I was sitting
right next to the camera, and I had an M16 rifle loaded with blanks between my knees,
because sometimes Oliver would want me to add off-camera fire to juice the scene and
juice the emotions.
And I went to sleep with my head leaning on the flash suppressor of the M16, and the
scene began to roll, and I heard action, and I looked up, and as I looked up, I saw these
two actors playing North Vietnamese Army soldiers coming out of that fog, and I panicked.
I threw the rifle up into my shoulder, and Oliver reached over and grabbed it and pushed
it down so that I didn't disturb the scene, but I was right back.
I was going to open up on those guys.
So yeah, there were moments throughout filming when stuff like that happened.
Yeah, and you played Captain Harris in the movie as well?
I did, the heroic and very handsome company commander by the name of Captain Harris, and
that was really by accident.
Oliver had seen me teaching, and he said, you know, you're perfect for this.
Just get in there and do what you do.
And I did, and I was very fortunate.
The critics, who were all over Platoon, obviously, as we began to gain momentum and attention,
had some very nice things to say about me and what I had brought to the scenes of the
movie in which I played.
And that kind of gave a huge boost to what was, at that point, whether I wanted it or
not, a burgeoning acting career.
Yeah, it's funny, actually, I ended up working with Oliver Stone myself and in a totally
different capacity.
I wasn't side by side with him.
I was just a glorified extra.
They hired a bunch of real firefighters in LA to work on the World Trade Center movie
about the Port Authority guys that actually survived the collapse.
So yeah, that was interesting.
I hadn't really worked on a high budget movie before.
I'd done some TV and lots of live stunt shows.
But yeah, I got to work with him very briefly.
Visionary filmmaker.
Yeah, he really is.
I can't say I ever agree with him politically.
In fact, on the set, they used to call me John Wayne and him Ho Chi Minh.
But he's a visionary filmmaker, and he taught me a lot and gave me huge breaks.
I'll always be grateful for that.
Right.
So I want to go on to maybe not your next movie, but the next the big one.
I know there's a great story and I'd love to hear it from actually from you, but the
story of how you conducted the boot camp for Saving Private Ryan and how you, correct me
if I'm wrong, this is the story that's been told.
You kept the one group together and then Matt Damon came in later.
Is that correct?
Yeah, it is.
We made a decision, not to include Matt Damon, who played Private Ryan, in the training that
I did for Tom Hanks and Jeremy Davis and all of the other, Tom Sizemore and Rob Lisey and
all the other guys.
We made a decision not to include him because we knew how well my training works.
And if we had put him in training with the rest of the actors, they would have bonded.
It's going to happen.
That's part and parcel of why I train the way I do.
And if that happened, the performance when they met each other would have been a false
note and we both knew that, so we decided not to include Matt.
But I still had to get him trained.
And so later on, once the initial training of the main cast was over, I took Matt aside
and ran him through some stuff.
He had to learn how to handle a 2.6-inch rocket launcher, Bazooka, and a number of other things.
And so I ran him through an abbreviated solo sort of training syllabus after the main training
syllabus was over.
And how long was the boot camp for the rest of the cast?
We had him in the field for eight days and I had Matt for about three days.
Okay, because I know Tom Hanks' scene where he goes around the corner and then breaks
down, I mean, that to me as a viewer was as real as anything I'd ever seen on screen before.
Yeah, and Tom's been very kind and kind to credit me with giving him some insight, some
emotional psychological insight as to what he might be feeling, what he might be thinking.
And I think it helped him.
It helped him get where he needed to go for that scene.
Yeah, yeah.
And I know the opening D-Day landing, the Normandy landing, I think that was literally
a paradigm shift in theater after that too.
Yeah, I got my Eisenhower fix that day, I'll tell you.
We had about 800 to 1,000 Irish sort of National Guard territorial army soldiers on the beach,
14 armored vehicles and seven boats at sea.
So it was a zoo and once we rolled it, no use standing there waving your arms and yelling
cut, that wasn't going to happen.
They were going to go straight through this thing.
Yeah, I'm sorry, go on.
No, I was about to say that's one of the reasons I had to teach them to reload and operate
their own weapons and carry extra ammo because we couldn't stop to have some armor run in
and reload an M1 for them.
I think one thing that I took from watching the film that I'd never really seen before,
maybe it was present in Pertoon but it seemed far more poignant in Saving Private Ryan,
was the fact that you'd get to know a character and then all of a sudden they just get shot.
And you're like, wait a second, the good guys always survive in these movies before and
it just showed the futility or the senselessness of the loss of life in combat.
Well, it's neither futile nor senseless, but it is random.
Okay, that's a better word.
Yeah, okay.
But again, so you get vested in a character when you watch a movie and before they protected
that character.
Okay, this is a central figure in the script.
But now...
If he's hit, it's always in the shoulder.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, so now the guy's gone.
You're like, okay, that sucked.
Yeah.
So, all right, well, that brings me to the next big project and there's a story again
between us with that.
When I was out of drama school and really before I got into the stunt side, I was stuck
in that vortex of being told by agencies that they like my work but go get another one,
they'll come and watch it and then they'll sign me and then not be able to get work because
I didn't have an agent.
And I'd actually submitted my resume to this project called Bander Brothers, which obviously
you worked on.
And then when we met in Japan, years later, you'd said if you'd known me, I would have
been a good fit.
So that initially was always like this awful haunting experience for me.
But then now as a fireman, I realized I was never destined to be on screen anyway.
So tell me about how Bander Brothers came into your life.
Well, I was down on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles buying a suitcase and I can't remember
why.
But my cell phone rang and it was Steven Spielberg.
And he said, look, I've got something.
Can you meet me?
And I said, you're Steven Spielberg.
You're damn right I can meet you.
So I bought the suitcase and then I went to Universal Lot into Amblin and in an office
there was Tom Hanks and a couple of producers and some people from HBO.
And they said, look, we are going to do a mini series, 10 Hours for Television, based
on a book called Bander Brothers.
And I said, oh, I know that book.
I know that book very well, Steven Ambrose.
And they said, yeah, that's right.
I said, great.
How can I help?
And they said, well, it's going to take about a year to get this done.
But we're going to do it and we're going to do it in England.
And we want you to design and train the actors.
There'll be as many as 40 or 50 of them.
And we want you to be the primary consultant for all the department heads, uniforms, weapons,
everything else.
How's that sound, Captain Die?
And I said, well, that is not a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
I'm ready.
What do I do here?
Where do I sign?
And so we began the process of assembling what it took to do Bander Brothers.
I was able to take the entire cast into a place called Longmore Camp in the UK, which
is a British military reserve base, and set up the training.
Before I did that, I actually assembled a unit of Germans.
And we all got into German uniform and I taught them German weapons and tactics for a week.
And then I sent the Germans away and I brought in the Americans.
And we trained them very, very hard because I knew that we had a big one here.
And the neat thing about a miniseries is that you've got time to explore the characters.
You've got 10 hours.
And so I wanted it to be absolutely on the mark, spot on as I could get it.
So we did an enormous amount of historical research.
We trained hard up to and including the British gave us access to their number one parachute
school at Bries Norton.
And we bussed the entire cast up there and sent them, went them, put them through ground
school for parachuting.
The only thing they wouldn't let me do is actually get them out of the door of an airborne
aircraft.
That was insurance problems.
But we did everything else.
We did everything short of that.
And it was one of the most marvelous training experiences I ever had.
I had about six of my own cadre, my NCOs and officers who were with me.
And we were able to pay strict and close attention to everybody in that film.
We knew we had magic about halfway through it.
And to this day, I think it remains one of the things I constantly hear about.
I mean, all of the Band of Brothers actors get together once a year.
We have a reunion.
I got this great opportunity to play Colonel Bob Sink, who is the commanding officer of
the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment.
So all of the stars had aligned.
And of course, we, I don't know, once something like 13 Emmys.
But it was magic.
And it's one of the things I'm most proud of in a long and varied and lurid career.
Yeah, I would say it was my favorite piece of film slash television full stop.
I mean, no question.
The other day, the band, Saving Private Ryan and Platoon are up there.
Axel Ridge I saw recently was phenomenal, but Band of Brothers will always be my favorite
hands down.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And you're among a huge amount of people all over the world.
I was in Bathstone earlier this year.
They invited me over.
And you know, there were like 2500 people in the snow and cold lined up just to shake
my hand or have me sign a picture or sign a poster or you know, get my picture taken
with them.
And when something like that happens to a loser like me, you know, that tells you you
did something special.
And we certainly did with Band of Brothers.
Now the most of the original guys were still alive at that point, weren't they?
So were they involved?
A lot of them were.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And Steven made sure that, Steven Spielberg made sure that as many of them as possible,
as many of the actors who were portraying real characters who were still alive, spent
as much time on the phone or visits or whatever we could to connect them up.
And I monitored all of that because I knew that we were going to have to depart in some
areas from what actually happened for dramatic license.
But the guys, they were all these really good up and coming sort of B-list actors.
None of them were stars at this point.
And so they were the serious guys.
They were the storytellers.
They were the ones who wanted to do this right.
And so those guys like Bill Garnier and Babe Heffron and a bunch of others, you know, were
there.
And they weren't there all the time we were filming, but they came to see us when we were
training and they were an enormous help.
Yeah, their personal testimony at the end of each episode was just heartbreaking to
see them reliving that story in their mind and their eyes kind of tear up was about as
moving as anything I've ever seen.
Yeah, which is one of the things I'm trying to do with this new movie.
I'm raising money, seed money for a film called No Better Place to Die, which is, I hope,
will do for the 82nd Airborne in World War II what Band of Brothers did for the 101st.
It's an extraordinary movie.
And I'm sort of playing off what we did with Band of Brothers because this will be a theatrical
release, 120 minutes rather than 10 hours for television.
But I think I can do it.
I think I can combine elements of the opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan with all
of the in-depth coverage that we did in Band of Brothers.
And I've been trying to do it for years, James, and I wrote it.
I want to direct it.
It has to do with the fight of a cobbled together group of 82nd Airborne paratroopers at La
Fiere, a bridge which had to be taken and held by the paratroopers or the Germans would
have bombed right across it and blown the Americans, the allies off the landing beaches.
So it was crucial to the success of D-Day.
And it was a story that I had known for years, and I always thought it was a microcosmic
look at what can happen when small groups of motivated individuals get together and
the big plan goes in the crapper.
But these guys know what has to be done, and they come together, and they do it.
And no one had ever examined that fight on film.
And I said, well, I should.
And so I wrote it.
And after I wrote it and backed off a bit, I said, well, you know, after the only way
to really make this the beauty, the blockbuster that it needs to be is if I direct it.
Now, I've directed some second unit stuff and so on and so forth, but the budget is
up around 20, $25 million.
And I was having an enormous amount of trouble getting people to trust me with that much
money, despite my record of success and so on and so forth, because I would not be the
guy who said how the money gets spent.
And so I fooled with it for about four years off and on, really trying to do it in the
traditional Hollywood fashion.
And I was unsuccessful.
So I decided, you know the hell with it.
Those paratroopers in June of 1944, who dropped in and took Lafayette and held it against
incredible German attacks, they adapted, innovated, and overcame.
And that, by God, is what I need to do with this picture.
And so we started this, we started a crowdfunding thing.
And it's in existence right now.
I'm sure you'll put it in the show notes.
But one of the things that I decided to do, and this goes to your question or your comment
about the vortex of what I've, showbiz, I've understood for many years, because I get constant
emails and phone calls and letters, that there's a huge pool of talented military veterans
out there trying to break into showbiz, either as actors or technicians.
And because they started a little later, and because they haven't done what would be considered
an apprenticeship, they have a hell of a time demonstrating their talent in motion pictures
and television.
And I said, well, you know, look, let's do it this way.
Let's make No Better Place to Die, a movie about veterans, for veterans, and done by
veterans.
So I am bound and determined to put as many real veterans in front of the camera and behind
the camera as I can.
I want this to be a kind of a showcase and show Hollywood what talent is out there.
It's a long, hard slog, James.
Getting somebody to trust us, you know, showbiz is the biggest crapshoot in the world.
And getting somebody with deep enough pockets to trust us is a long uphill slog.
But what I'm seeing, and this goes back to that great groundswell of populism that I
was talking about, what we're seeing is the support we're getting and the veterans who
are just coming out of the woodwork and saying, what can I do?
I'll dig ditches, I'll pour coffee, I'll be your tea bitch, whatever you need me to do.
I want to be involved in this, because this is our shot.
This is our time.
And so we're raising the seed money, and we hope that the money we raise will help us
with admin costs and, most importantly, will prove to people with deep pockets who can
invest in this sort of thing that we have that popular support, that we have that groundswell.
And this will be a huge moneymaker if they'll come in with enough money to help us get it
made.
And I segwayed right the hell into what I wanted to talk about there.
And so that's what we're doing.
We're reaching out to everybody I can.
I'm doing every podcast, every interview to try to explain this to people and to elicit
their support monetarily or just physically, help us build the buzz, talk about this project,
investigate this project.
It's all there on an Indiegogo page, No Better Place to Die.
And you're going to read the philosophy.
You're going to read what we're trying to do.
We're bound and determined to give some of the profits, if any, back to veterans' causes.
I want this to be proof that we can do things without having to bow and kowtow to the way
Hollywood normally does things.
Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity as well for action.
You see social media flooded with support, our troops and American flags and that kind
of thing.
But that's not doing anything.
No, it isn't.
What great way to honor it.
And believe me, the veterans know that.
I'm sure they do.
So this is an opportunity, I think, as you say, to put words into action.
Okay.
Well, I will definitely post that link and I will continually share that project as well
and see if my small project can be part of the Jigsaw puzzle that will help push it forward.
And if you do need an English person that's really good at falling over for the project,
you just let me know.
Absolutely.
So thank you so much for giving us all your time.
I've got a couple of very quick questions for you and then we'll let you get on your
way.
Okay.
So I just want to talk briefly about books.
Normally I ask what books do people recommend, but I want to give you the opportunity to
talk about the books that you've written because I went to list them and there were so many.
So which books have you got out there and which would be your, let's say your top three
to recommend people to read?
Well I think they probably ought to take a look at Run Between the Raindrops, which is
a Vietnam story.
I would love to recommend the file series, the Shake Davis Adventures.
This is a single character that goes through, I think there's seven books out there now.
It's called the Shake Davis File Series.
They're each a file, like Laos file, Aztec file is the most recent one, Beirut file and
so on and so forth.
So they're all military themed with a single character as the protagonist and kind of like
Lee Child and Jack Reacher.
So I'd recommend the file series books.
I'd recommend Run Between the Raindrops and we're about to bring out a reissue of one
of my earlier books called Duty and Dishonor, which is a very fascinating Vietnam story.
But it has elements of what was happening in the nation all throughout the 1970s and
80s.
So those would be the top three, James.
Okay and then very last question then.
Where can people find you, find your Warriors Inc. site and just remind us again of where
to find the No Better Place to Die website.
Okay, No Better Place to Die is an official, that's the name of the site, No Better Place
to Die.
You can find that on Facebook and it will lead you to the Indiegogo fundraising campaign.
And I'm on three or four sites on Facebook, Warriors Inc., Dale Die Group, Warriors Publishing
Group, Captain Dale Die and Dale Die, they're all on Facebook.
There's also all kinds of Twitter and Instagram sites, none of which I'm aware of because
I don't do them, I don't tweet, but I have people who tweet for me.
So I guess, you know, if you just whack up the computer and hit Dale Die and there are
no better place to die in there, it will take you all over.
Okay, brilliant.
Well, I'm going to let you get on your way.
Thank you so much for being so generous with your time.
You've given so many lessons and an amazing life story.
It was a pleasure working with you before and I've really loved reconnecting and I hope
that we can talk again in the future sometime.
Well, I do too, James.
It's been a real pleasure.
And just let me know when, where and how on this thing and I'll publicize your podcast
and hopefully we'll get some people sharing our conversation and our insights.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
I came to see you guys.