Dale Dye

Served as a combat correspondent with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam in 1967-1968. A fellow combat correspondent in the same unit was the late Gustav Hasford. Hasford wrote "The Short-Timers," the Vietnam novel on which the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987) was based.

A great number of the war films I saw, however, didn't match my own experience... The uniforms were pressed, the guys were clean, and they reacted in such a heroic fashion to life in extremes. No matter what Sir Laurence Olivier had to say, it isn't just acting when something is so out of your frame of reference. You have to have an idea of what the truth is. Nobody did.