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In the movie theaters, this illegal shooting usually gets a big hand. Righteous vengeance. Good guy kills bad guy. It is the kind of movie catharsis that may make Platoon a megahit. But can Chris or the audience take moral satisfaction in this deed? Which "father" has he followed? Has Chris become like Elias, back from the grave to avenge his own murder? "You have to fight evil if you are going to be a good man," Stone says. "That's why Chris killed Barnes. Because Barnes deserved killing." Or has he emulated his enemy? Has he become Barnes in order to kill him? Stone has another answer: "I also wanted to show that Chris came out of the war stained and soiled -- all of us, every vet. I want vets to face up to it and be proud they came back. So what if there was some bad in us? That's the price you pay. Chris pays a big price. He becomes a murderer." A good man, and a murderer? It is a tribute to Platoon's cunning that it can sell this dilemma both ways, and a mark of Stone's complexity that he can argue either side and believe both.
The dichotomy was bred in him. Stone was born in 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker and the French Catholic girl he met just after V-E day while serving as a colonel on Eisenhower's staff. Lou Stone wrote a monthly newsletter about economics and politics; his son describes the style as "right-wing Walter Lippmann, a view of the world every month. My father believed that life was hard. The important thing was to make a living." Jacqueline Stone was just the opposite: inexhaustibly sociable, the original bete de fete. "My mother loved movies," Stone says, "and every Monday I'd play hooky, and we'd go see two or three movies. From the start, I had the contradiction in me: my mother's outgoing, optimistic, French side and the dark, pessimistic, Jewish side of my father."
The Stones lived in Manhattan town houses and Stamford, Conn., homes; Oliver went to Manhattan's tony Trinity School and the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.; he summered with his maternal grandparents and spoke French before he learned English. (From Viet Nam, Oliver would write his grandmother versions of the letters that Chris reads in Platoon.) At five he composed skits for a marionette show, casting his French cousins in the parts. At seven he wrote stories. To earn a quarter for a Classic comic book, he would write a theme each week for his father. And at nine he started work on a book, 900 pages about his family and his life.
Oliver stopped writing the book when he was twelve; the family stopped when Oliver was 16. "The news of their divorce came as a total shock," Stone recalls. "The Hill School headmaster was the one who told me. And when they were divorced, my father gave me the facts of life. He told me that he was heavily in debt. He said, 'I'll give you a college education, and then you're on your own. There's literally no money.' "