#ben fitzgerald

Perhaps the most critical audience for Platoon, Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning movie about the Vietnam war, are the men he served with from 1967-68. Stone was actually in several platoons, and since the film’s release, he has received hundreds of letters from veterans, some of whom he shared a foxhole with at one time or another. Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, many of these infantrymen came home with serious psychological problems, and almost all felt unappreciated by the U.S. public. Some still have not managed to put their lives back together. Last week in Chicago, six of Stone’s buddies gathered for a reunion....On the following pages, ten of Stone’s comrades in arms reflect on the moviemaker, his film and the war that brought them together.

Fighting next to Oliver Stone one day, Jimmie Danna said, “I’m the best actor in the world. It’s impossible for you to get any scareder than me, but I will not let you see me scared. That’s the reason I’m surviving.” Indeed survival was everything, according to Danna, who served three tours of duty in Vietnam, the second with Stone. “Me and Oliver were in a situation where it was keeping each other alive,” says Danna. “It was like, ‘I’ll take care of your back; you take care of mine.’ We shared everything—women, food, drugs, animosity, fear, whatever.” 

Ben Fitzgerald, 44, considers the 13 months he spent in Vietnam as “the worst experience of my life.” He blames his divorce on the trouble he had adjusting to life back in the States. “I was drinking, gambling and having a hard time dealing with people,” he says, “and my wife couldn’t understand.” A die cast operator in Humboldt, Tenn., Fitzgerald describes Stone as “a friendly-type person. I introduced him to soul music and marijuana. We shared a lot of hours and a lot of fear.” [...] Fitzgerald thinks Stone enlisted because he “just wanted to see what the war was all about. I don’t think he really had to be there, but he made the best of the situation. He told me that what he really wanted to do was be in the movies. He wrote a poem about the places he had been, and it amazed me because it was a great poem. After the war I really expected him to come up in the movies.” The father of two boys, Fitzgerald liked Platoon but doesn’t want his 69-year-old mother or 70-year-old father to see it. “I don’t think they could take it,” he says, “because they didn’t have any idea of what I was going though. But I want my sons to see the movie so they’ll know that something like this shouldn’t happen again.”

Michael Blodgett, 39, remembers walking point with Stone when the future filmmaker was attacked by spiders. “I saw the spiders fall down his shirt,” says Blodgett. “I saw his shirt pulsating in and out, and he was pounding on it like Tarzan. From that time on, he had a phobia about spiders.” [...] Blodgett calls Stone a “gentle giant” who didn’t really belong in Vietnam because he “didn’t have the killer instinct.” Blodgett remembers that Stone’s well-to-do upbringing would often show in curious ways. “Oliver knew how to operate a P-38, which was an Army can opener. But one day I gave him a regular can opener to open C rations because it was faster. Oliver had it upside down. I laughed and said, ‘Can’t you open a can?’ And he answered, ‘I’ve never opened a can in my life. The maids do that.’ ” 

In the movie, Charlie Sheen writes to his grandmother and describes the guys in his platoon, complete with their hometowns. One of those is Pulaski, Tenn., and it’s the real-life home of Crutcher Patterson, 39, who spent 12 months in Vietnam and says that even though Stone was not “the everyday type of fellow,” he and Oliver became “good buddies.” In 1984 the filmmaker visited Patterson to discuss the battle that would later become the climactic scene in the movie. “He asked me how we were positioned,” says Patterson. “He got wounded, and that ended us being together.” [...] The movie, says Patterson, “is all right with me. We tried to take care of one another; we tried to survive. We didn’t abuse the children. They were our trading partners. The kids sold us marijuana. They were trying to survive too.” 

Jack Pelletier, 38, feels Platoon is historically inaccurate. “The real war,” he says, “was much, much worse.” Still, he continues, “I thought the movie was great. My friends ask me, ‘Was the jungle that thick?’ ‘No,’ I tell them, ‘it was thicker.’ Most of the time you couldn’t walk; you had to crawl to get through. The movie showed one leech on a guy’s cheek. Well, hell, there were a million leeches. They were all over the place.” [...] Pelletier’s memory of Stone is somewhat vague. “He was the guy who slept in the first bunk on the left. He was sort of a loner. He didn’t go to none of the parties or drink in the PX. But you know,” adds Pelletier softly, “you get to know guys real well, then two days later, they ship them home in a bag. That was hard, so I didn’t get too close to nobody.”

Dick Ware, 37, lives in Superior, Wis. and builds bridges for the Burlington-Northern Railroad. He says he and Stone were “foxhole buddies. He was a good soldier. He did his job. You couldn’t say that about everyone. He had proven himself. For a city boy, he was pretty good in the jungle.” [...] “It took me six or seven years, and I still don’t know if I’ve got it all together,” he says. “I’ve got a nice wife and two lovely kids, but I still have dreams and think about Vietnam a lot. You don’t go through something like that and not have it on your mind.” 

Jim Pappert, of Affton, Mo., has seen Platoon twice, and although he served for six months with Stone, he disagrees with some of what he saw in the film. “The movie didn’t show enough of our people being maimed and killed,” says Pappert, 38....Even good guys can get caught up in the heat of battle, and Pappert says he saw it happen. “We swept a lot of villages and searched them,” he remembers, “and there were a lot of men who couldn’t wait to get in there and beat somebody’s head off. The expression on Charlie Sheen’s face in the movie was like my expression the first time we went through a village and I saw the brutality of the Americans toward the villagers. But when you experienced the death of your own men, you didn’t give a damn about them anymore; you had no feelings for the Vietnamese.” 

Andre Fontenelle, 41, arrived in Vietnam the same month as Stone and remembers the filmmaker as “a quiet person who kept to himself.” Fontenelle feels Stone’s movie rings true, especially the scene in which a patrol is ambushed because someone falls asleep on watch. “It seemed like somebody would always fall asleep on guard,” he remembers. “It would be getting light out, and it seemed the whole damn squad would be snoring.” Now a grandfather, Fontenelle works at the post office in Aberdeen. A Vietnam veterans organization was recently started nearby, and he says he’s going to join. “I hope the government learns from its mistakes over there,” he says. “We lost more than 55,000 men. They’ve been dead for 20 years. They should be here like me—raising a family, waiting for grandchildren. To me, they were just wasted.”

Of all the Vietnam films Monte Newcombe has seen, he thinks Platoon is the most realistic. “It showed the waste, corruption, filth, napalm, blood and guts, the destruction and absolute craziness of that war....There’s a lot I can’t remember,” says Newcombe, now 40. “There’s a lot I don’t think about.” One thing he does recall is the incredible resolve of the Vietnamese people. “Here we were in their homeland,” says Newcombe, “destroying their lives and villages. I could relate to that. I knew how I would feel if they came to Oklahoma and burned down my house.” An afternoon spent reminiscing about what Newcombe describes as “the most frightening time of my life” takes its emotional toll on Monte. Tears well up in his eyes as he says, “I never wanted to kill anybody. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.” The dining room is quiet. The only sounds that can be heard are the muffled shouts of Newcombe’s small sons, playing with their toy guns in the front yard.

Info: Ben Fitzgerald (and do not murder me over his full name, alright, @anotheraskandheadcanonblog and I liked it)

Full Name: Benjamin Franklin Fitzgerald (yes I realize his name)

Age: 15

Height/Weight: 4’6”, 125 lbs

Birthday: 3/26/02

Birthplace: Green Cove Springs, FL

Family: Liam Fitzgerald ([Step]father), Elijah Fitzgerald (Younger brother), Sofia Fitzgerald (Mother).

Godly Parent: Hermes (Cabin 11)

Grade: 10th grade (Sophomore) (*Skipped ninth grade*)

Friends: Toby Rogers, Jeff Woods, Sally Williams, and a few online friends.

Enemies: Jeff (kinda a frenemy thing), Tim Wright, Jack Kingsley

Pets: Male ridge-tailed monitor lizard named Alligator.

Weapon: It’s hard to explain (), but the way I can think of to describe it is, it’s this blade essentially made of code, that extends from this thing on his wrist. (I already described it in the weapons-based post, but I’m probably going to try and think of a better way to.)

Backstory: Ben lived in Green Cove until he was about 11, his younger brother being about six at the time, attending Congregational Holiness, a Christian school (which he hated, seeing as he wasn’t, and still is not, Christian). About five months after he had turned eleven, his father got offered a programming job in Brooklyn, NY, prompting the family to move (much to Ben’s delight). He started at Clara Barton High, which ended up being where he met Jeff Woods — who eventually became a sort of frenemy. Ben did fairly well in school, mostly a B student, taking a couple electives as well — his main focus being programming. But, this isn’t all to say he didn’t end up in hot water sometimes, as he has a penchant for trouble, which resulted in in-school suspension at least once. (*And this is all the backstory I’m doing now, as I want to try and keep this short, more will end up revealed if/when this turns into a fic*)

This week in Hollywood, it was glitz, glamour and talk that the three Golden Globe Awards for Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” might presage more honors for his powerful Vietnam War drama at Oscar time.

It was a somewhat headier setting than last month, when five men, Stone among them, came to New York to meet in a large oak-paneled room at the stately old 7th Regiment Armory here.

Their talk was of a far different world than Hollywood, a 15-years-ago world of things like beehive rounds, the NVA, 11-Bravos, lifers, LAAWs, leechers, Claymores, AKs, a place called Firebase Burt.

Vietnam memories.

This week in Hollywood, it was glitz, glamour and talk that the three Golden Globe Awards for Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” might presage more honors for his powerful Vietnam War drama at Oscar time.

It was a somewhat headier setting than last month, when five men, Stone among them, came to New York to meet in a large oak-paneled room at the stately old 7th Regiment Armory here.

Their talk was of a far different world than Hollywood, a 15-years-ago world of things like beehive rounds, the NVA, 11-Bravos, lifers, LAAWs, leechers, Claymores, AKs, a place called Firebase Burt.

Vietnam memories.

It was hard for some of the men to talk about sad or tragic moments. One asked that the names of three dead men he mentioned not be used, lest it cause their families further pain.

All thought that Stone’s “Platoon” would help Americans understand--at least to some degree--what the ordinary riflemen, the grunts, went through in the war.

They all laughed at John Rambo, winner of the Hollywood Medal of Honor.

“I hope this movie blows ‘Rambo’ right out of the water,” said one of the real veterans. “Yeah,” said another, “because Rambo was nothing but one hero that never went there.”

“If we’d had two Rambos, we’d have won the war,” he chuckled as two TV cameras recorded the reunion of Stone with four other ex-grunts--three of whom he’d served with in Vietnam.

Those three: Ben Fitzgerald, 43, now a die-cast operator living in Humboldt, Tenn.; Crutcher Patterson, 39, co-owner of a used auto parts yard in Pulaski, Tenn., and Jim Pappert, 38, a production mechanic in St. Louis, Mo.

They were joined by a friend of Stone’s from Los Angeles, Ruben Gomez, 45, who also was in Vietnam but not in their unit.

Their reunion was arranged by and taped for CBS’ new “The Morning Program,” which plans to air it as a four-part series next week, Tuesday through Friday, the week of the Academy Award nominations.

It was an unusual, at times quietly emotional three-hour session. It was moderated by Stone, 40, who now lives in Brentwood.

His film, while generally acclaimed, hasn’t been without controversy.

Some of the controversy comes from vets themselves, people like Jim Thomas, an Army medic at a battle called Hamburger Hill--which is both the name and basis of another Vietnam movie that recently completed filming.

Thomas, now a postal worker in Hayward, Calif., recently saw Stone’s film. In a phone interview, he said he was outraged by parts of the movie, particularly one scene in a hamlet that “made me cower down in my chair and hope no one would think I was a Vietnam veteran.”

In that scene, after a platoon member is killed, some--but by no means all--of the men in his platoon erupt in blind rage after uncovering North Vietnamese weapons and explosives hidden in the hamlet.

Thomas conceded that Vietnam was not the same war to every grunt who served there. The type of combat, a unit’s discipline and compassion or the lack of either--all that could and did vary markedly in the war.

“I’m not saying things like that didn’t happen,” the ex-medic said of the brutal hamlet scene in Stone’s film. “But it (the movie) wasn’t a representation of all of us.”

Although Stone recalled witnessing such moments when he was in Vietnam, none of the three with whom he served wanted to dwell on it, particularly Pappert, a short, bearded, soft-spoken man.

Interviewed during a pause in the CBS taping, he declined to be specific. But he told a reporter that “there were a lot of things in there (the movie) that I don’t relate to.”

More should have been shown about the ambiguous feelings of GIs toward the Vietnamese, he added: “Like when you first got there, you felt sorry for the people, the way they were being treated.

“But then it got to a point, after a period of time, that you didn’t give a damn about them. You didn’t care who they were or their feelings . . . you were just waiting for your day to get out.”

The taping session had its lighter moments, the easy banter of friendships born in war--as when Stone kidded Patterson about turning him on to pot (which, all agreed, never was smoked in the field).

“I have been known to smoke a joint, yeah,” drawled the burly Tennessean, a plain-spoken man who proved eloquent in his directness. He’d been a squad leader. He hadn’t wanted the job, he said, but “the rest of them had either gone home or got wounded or killed.”

The five covered a wide range of topics--the misery of life in the bush; racism toward the Vietnamese and among U.S. troops; the closeness of the grunts, whether black, white or Latino; the music of the time, and homecomings and problems of adjustment.

At one point, Patterson grew impatient on a different subject--when Gomez spoke of the high suicide rates of veterans and reeled off statistics about homeless Vietnam veterans in Los Angeles.

“Is it Vietnam’s fault?” he demanded.

“No, no,” Gomez said. “I think it was that America couldn’t--didn’t deal with the problem at the beginning . . . it was just like, ‘Get lost!’ ”

Patterson agreed. But he also made clear his pride and lack of self-pity as he softly added: “We’ve got to get over it sometime.”

As the taping wore on, that attitude of putting the war behind them also seemed the underlying philosophy of Pappert and Fitzgerald, the latter the only black in the group, a man Stone affectionately called “Fitz.”

At the end, Pappert, picking his words carefully and with difficulty, tried to sum up his thoughts about Vietnam.

“The best way to explain it is just this,” he said. “I’d like to put it all in my past, and hope for a better future for this country. . . . History repeats itself, but we hope it doesn’t this time.”

That night, the visitors adjourned to the Lion’s Head, a cheery Greenwich Village pub. They were later joined by Stone, retired Marine Capt. Dale Dye, who trained the actors in “Platoon” and played an Army captain in it, and Tom Cruise, the young “Top Gun” fighter pilot.

Beer and good talk flowed freely around their table.

During the CBS taping session, Fitzgerald had jokingly groused about all the guys he knew who didn’t go to Vietnam but who, when he came back, wanted him to buy them a drink.

“And they’ve been sitting home, making all the money, and here you are over there fighting all this time,” he marveled.

So that evening, someone who had been at the CBS taping and came away with a great deal of admiration for Stone’s friends from Vietnam, bought the table a round of drinks.

He made sure that Fitz got two.

CBS's 'The Morning Program,' as fluffy as buttermilk flapjacks most mornings, gets a heavy hunk of reality this week with a four-part segment that reunites some long lost platoon buddies from Vietnam.

The segment, airing Tuesday through Friday on 'The Morning Program' (7:30-9 a.m. EST), brings together Oliver Stone, the man who wrote and directed the movie 'Platoon,' and four soldiers from a war many Americans would like to forget.

It wasn't easy. For years Stone had been trying to contact one particular platoon pal, Benjamin Fitzgerald, to no avail. Every time Stone would call, he'd get Fitzgerald's mother, who would not pass along the messages.

'She thought it was somebody looking for her son, the IRS or whatever, because when he came back from Vietnam he was a junkie and in trouble,' explains Andrea Davis, who produced the four-part segment. 'It wasn't until CBS called that she believed it was a legitimate call.'

So CBS brought the five men together at the 7th Brigade Armory on Park Avenue, and for four hours, the cameras rolled. There is no correspondent, no interviewer, no narrator. Just five men whose paths crossed in Vietnam and again at the Park Avenue armory.

Bob Shanks, creator and executive producer of 'The Morning Program,' thought it would be better that way -- without an outsider asking questions or directing the conversation -- and he was right.

The soldiers talked, and when they ran out of words, their thoughts were etched on their faces.

For those who have not seen 'Platoon,' it is described by those who served in Vietnam as the most realistic movie ever made on the subject -- better than the best scenes of 'The Deer Hunter,' 'Apocalypse Now' and Rambo.

Stone served with Crutcher Patterson, Jim Pappert and Fitzgerald in the 1st Cavalry and with Ruben Gomez in the 1st Infantry.

And if you think that everyone who went to Vietnam did not want to be there, consider that Stone actually rushed to the battlefield, for fear of missing out on a chance to serve his country.

'I was real worried that the war was going to be over and I wouldn't get there in time,' Stone says.

'I can remember probably every minute that I was in Vietnam,' says one vet. 'Some nights what I'd do was try and count how many ambush patrols I was on, and then I'd get lost after counting 25 or 30 of them, when I'd remember 10, 15, 20 more. In the movie, when they show that ambush patrol in the beginning, I really felt that one, because you're out there, and you realize you're going to get contact ... you wish that maybe it's not them ... and then you come to the realization that it is them, and my heart used to go to my throat.'

The first two parts, airing Tuesday and Wednesday, feature actual film footage of the war, plus clips from the movie that have never been shown on television. The last two parts concentrate more on the roundtable discussion between the vets about Stone's film, their experiences in Vietnam and their lives since the war.

'These are the guys that the movie is based on, the ones who lived through the horror,' says producer Davis. 'They are sitting there giving their first-hand experiences of what they went through.'

The four-part segment, cooked up by Shanks and executed by Davis, is just what the doctor ordered for the new but ailing CBS morning show. And may mean even more for Stone and his war buddies.

'After they finished their talk, they all agreed that it was a great thing to get together,' says Davis. 'They agreed to keep in touch, to continue to share their lives, and to be friends.'

That part, which is not contained in the segment, is the best news of all.

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