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Indian indentured labourers (and descendants in Singapore and Malaya as well as Fiji), were influenced by anti-colonial movements in erstwhile homelands, and South East Asia was far from peaceful. 22 The Dutch withdrawal from Indonesia in 1949 (after recolonising attempts were rebuffed by nationalist forces) had left unresolved the status of West Papua, which for the first part of the 1950s remained as
adventure; but his experience, not just of combat but also of his return to a country that was already openly divided about the war, altered his perspective and the direction of his life. Enrolment at film school under the GI Bill seemed to offer a way of expressing his anger and disillusionment, and the same determination that had kept him alive in South-East Asia now drove him on to try and tell something of that experience on film. Even as he took his place in the Hollywood firmament, the subject did not need to be Th e ci nem a of Ol iver S to ne 232 Vietnam to
the war on Stone was not some damascene conversion to liberal politics, but the germination of an angry disillusionment felt by many returning veterans from South- East Asia, exemplified in the 1971 march in Washington, DC by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.7 Having abandoned attempts to record his experiences on paper –a task rendered impossible in jungle conditions –Stone had taken belatedly to photographing the country as a personal record of his time there (Figure 2). The combination of his writing and the stark imagery that he managed to capture on film
conservative in the Eisenhower era believing that the US mission was to fight communism, is not an altogether unique parabolic curve of enlightenment for those scarred by war. His father taught his son to fear the Russians, so he volunteered for Vietnam and found the outside world’s complexity in the jungles of South-East Asia. However, he also found a very different American social milieu there from the middle-class Manhattan existence into which he had been born. Combat did not radicalise him politically straightaway, but the shock treatment woke him up to institutional