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By Root 444 0

to do anything. If you commit murder in the name of your country, it is called patriotism. Before sending them to Vietnam, the army brainwashed young men into believing that they were on the side of God. The marines sent young people to Camp Pendleton, isolated them and put them in a kind of trance through indoctrination, conditioning and training. If they were told to do something, they did it, just like the marines in World War II on Saipan who, when told to fire phosphorus bombs into caves where women and children were hiding, did it without question, remorse or guilt. They used flamethrowers to burn people alive, just as our pilots exterminated Vietnamese civilians with napalm and antipersonnel bombs that riddled their bodies with tiny barbed arrows designed to tumble inside them violently, with enhanced killing power. The soldiers who massacred the villagers at My Lai were no more inherently evil than the German soldiers who committed atrocities in World War II. They had simply been programmed into becoming murderous predators. At places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, our soldiers had been conditioned by much the same creed drummed into Christian Diestl: “My country right or wrong; when my country calls me, I will do my duty; I will do anything.”

37

WES MICKLER GAVE ME one of the best lessons of an actor’s life: never trust a horse, he said, because you’ll never find a smart one. He used to lean back in his old spindle chair in Libertyville, give me a long, knowing look and tell me that all horses were dumb. He was right. I’ve never met a smart horse. I’ve also known a lot of dumb riders, including me. The worst place for an actor to be when he’s making a western, I discovered, is on top of a charging horse with a bunch of other horses chasing you from behind. You can’t see them and they can’t see you. Because of the dust, visibility is about five feet, and the horses behind you will run over you if anything goes wrong. In Julius Caesar I was leading an army across a field when the tongue of my shoe got caught in a stirrup. I leaned over and tried to pull it out, but couldn’t reach it, so I thought I’d leave it until the take was over. It was dumb. After riding quite a distance, I looked back and saw the whole field of horses racing fast toward me, bucking and kicking and leaping; some of them were rolling on the ground. I tried to get my horse to run, but because my foot was stuck, it was impossible to convey this to the horse except in a loud, nervous voice. The horse wouldn’t go any faster, I couldn’t get out of the way of the ones behind me and I came within a hair of falling in front of the galloping herd, still secured neatly to my stirrup. I kept my head down while the horses stampeded past me and tried to figure out what had happened. Then I learned that I’d ridden over a hornets’ nest and they had taken their revenge on the riders and horses behind me.

On Viva Zapata! I was in a scene in which four horsemen holding me prisoner galloped up a road and suddenly found themselves facing an army of troops loyal to me. The man holding my horse, a big stallion with a huge neck, was meant to let go of the reins after realizing that he was about to be slaughtered, and I was supposed to take off down the road and escape. But as the four men turned their horses to look at the troops, they blocked the path in front of me and my horse simply ran over them. At another point a bit player on that picture was supposed to ride up to me, jump off his horse and deliver important news to me. Wes Mickler had warned me that when you walk behind a horse who doesn’t know you, you should stay close enough to it so that it can’t reach out and kick you. If you pass within the outer radius of his hooves, he said, the horse can fire a knockout punch at you. Unfortunately nobody had given such advice to this bit player, and when he ran around the back of the horse, he was in exactly the wrong place. The horse kicked him in the back of the head and he went down like a shot, dead.

When we were making Viva Zapata! I sometimes