From Combat to Camera: Influencing the Big Screen to Make War Movies Human
This week on the Unstoppable Stories podcast, Lauren Cardillo sits down with producer, actor, author, retired Marine and Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ alumnus, Dale Dye to trace the thread from Vietnam combat tours to Hollywood soundstages. Dale explains how a professor opened the door to writing, how a chance pitch led to three weeks in the jungle with 33 actors and why doing it right matters when stories shape how audiences see service and sacrifice.Â
Episode Information
Dale Dye:
The spirit of a warrior. The spirit of a soldier never changes. The weapons change the war, change. The politics change. But the spirit, the heart of that soldier is the same. And he's a human being, and he's liable to do just exactly what he did in 1775, is what he'll do in 2025.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Podcast Unstoppable Stories. With your host, Lauren Cardillo.
Lauren Cardillo:
Today I'm joined by Dale Dye, a man who wears many hats like retired Marine Corps author, actor, military advisor to films. Dale, thank you so much for being here today. We love having.
Dale Dye:
You. Sure. My pleasure. I hope we can engage some interesting conversation. We'll see how that goes.
Lauren Cardillo:
Exactly. So I just gave, like, the Wikipedia, like, you know, a little bio of you for people who have seen you in films. How would you describe Dale Dye like your career, what you do?
Dale Dye:
I think the word that fits most or best is weird. I yeah, as people who kind of follow the, as you know, I was 20 years in the United States Marine Corps. From officer to enlisted man, from enlisted man to officer, several combat tours and, throughout that, I'd always been a kind of a storyteller.
Dale Dye:
I'd always been to kind of a guy, you know, the guy around the campfire that can keep you fascinated for 45 minutes, telling a shaggy dog story that has absolutely no point at all. I'm that guy. And, and that led to a lot of things. I mean, I have a I have a creative itch, and I've always had it since I was a kid.
Dale Dye:
And it requires regular scratching. And to do that, I get a kick out of people. I'm a social kind of guy. And I love to tell stories. And I love to tell good stories, people that the stories to people can relate to. And and so I tried to do that, throughout my life and then, try to pursue a bit of an education that that would help me as a storyteller.
Dale Dye:
That would make me more facile, more glib. More interesting is Tori Teller while I was stationed out on Okinawa while I was in the Marine Corps. Several friends of mine were pursuing night school, going to school. And I said, well, how does that work? And so, look, there's this University of Maryland place. And all I knew about Maryland was, you know, it's somewhere near Washington, D.C., and.
Lauren Cardillo:
They're near Okinawa, right?
Dale Dye:
Yeah, I'm on Okinawa. So what the hell do I know about this? And, But but I looked into it. I talked to a couple of people, and they said, look, we can do this. What do you want to major in? And I said, well, I want to be a storyteller and a performer. And he said, well, slow down.
Dale Dye:
We don't necessarily have that right here, but we can help you, be a storyteller. I enrolled and we go to get to go to classes. And what what surprised me was how interesting stuff that I consider to be nonsense, really was.
Lauren Cardillo:
Like what?
Dale Dye:
Well, you know, I began to study. I studied history, but I hadn't really read it. I've read the nuts and bolts. You know, this happened on this date, and these people were involved. But now I began to read memoirs. I began to read sophisticated works of analysis and all that sort of thing. And that really opened my eyes.
Dale Dye:
You know, maybe I could do something like that. I mean, Jesus, I ended up, you know, in chemistry and and higher math and stuff that just made me gag. But I had to do it. I had a ticket. And the interesting thing was, I had these great teachers who said, look, stop being an idiot. Sit down. I'm going to explain this all to you and I.
Dale Dye:
I got that kind of treatment. And so I said.
Lauren Cardillo:
You like, you're you're you're in the Marines while.
Dale Dye:
You're doing this. Yeah. I kicking me in the butt was de rigueur. I understood all about that. And and these good Maryland instructors did, I'm not sure that was just the way they taught. Or because they thought they saw something valuable in me. But they they struggled with me and got me through these science and math courses.
Dale Dye:
And then I could return my attention to English, where I wanted to be. And I pursued it and continue to pursue it. And lo and behold, in 1981, I had, I had, fulfilled all the requirements. And off we went. I should, I should mention, that doctor Sydney. Doctor George. Sydney. Who kind of mentored me through my English pursuits, was a writer and a published writer, and he had read some of the things I was trying to put together, some sort of a memoir about my combat experiences in Vietnam, particularly in The Battle of Waste City and, Type 1968.
Dale Dye:
And he'd read some of that and he said, you know, this is a book. I said, yeah, but, you know, you got to find a publisher, and I got to find an editor, and then you have to convince somebody to read it. And he said, I can help with that. And he did. He sent it to, some agent friends of his, some publisher friends of his and, and lo and behold, it ended up being my first published novel and met, great critical acclaim.
Lauren Cardillo:
I just read it this week.
Dale Dye:
How do you.
Lauren Cardillo:
Run through the raindrops?
Dale Dye:
Yeah. Run through the raindrops. Right.
Lauren Cardillo:
And, reading through it, I could see your. Seems like, you know, it was very visual. Had great characters, you know, was obviously war, but I could see it going in my head.
Dale Dye:
Yeah. And and Sidney said at the time, I reminded him of Hunter Thompson, because of the way I described things and how I was involved in action. But it was a really tough book. And I think a lot of critics said, well, you know, this is a guy who's been there. Let's listen to him.
Dale Dye:
And lo and behold, they did. And since then, I guess I've, I've published about 12 more novels. And, it's it's another one of those issues that I've always got to scratch and and that's what I do when I'm not doing movies or television.
Lauren Cardillo:
Right. The list is impressive. I read, you know, I read through all the the names of the books. I was like, wow. Besides, everything else. You're right. You're writing books. So what? What made you decide that that book was very authentic, that I should now take that sense of authenticity to movies?
Dale Dye:
Well, I'll tell you what. What the real story is. I had always been a movie fan all my life, particularly military movies, because they were movies about my life. But the common denominator was they just pissed me off. They weren't. They weren't reflective or representative of what I know to be the truth about people in combat, about wars in general, about military life, about how we relate to each other, about where our, horrible black humor comes from.
Dale Dye:
And I began to think about that as well. Why the hell not? What's happening here? And through a lot of research, I discovered that very, very few people at this point, who were writing and producing and directing movies and had ever had a lick of military experience. They didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
Dale Dye:
So what they did is they mimicked or parodied the last they had war movie they saw and and it was a kind of a vicious circle, a circular firing squad. And I said, well, somebody's got to be able to break this. And and I'm not sure where I got the gumption to do it, but I said, well, look, that can be me.
Dale Dye:
I'll go out to Hollywood and I'll get on movie sets. And the first guy I see wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase and probably the producer. So I'll snatch him up and say, hey, you're screwed up, and I'm going to unscrew you. And here's how we that that didn't work real well. I ended up getting arrested and escorted off the lot, but there was, with.
Lauren Cardillo:
The best of them. With the best of them? Yeah.
Dale Dye:
Absolutely. Right. Right. But I decided I just needed a break, and I'd been out in LA. I was retired from active duty at this point, probably where in my university, graduation ring. So I've become a bit of a ring knocker as well as a, yeah, a wannabe. And I said, well, you know, I'm not having much luck at this.
Dale Dye:
And I was I was thinking over what my options were.
Dale Dye:
And frankly, as an English literature major, there weren't a lot. You know, I could I could be a cop, but I'd been shot too many times to want to be a cop on America's main streets. So, or I could. I could be, a cubicle rat, some defense contractor. But I'd be a suicide in six months.
Dale Dye:
And I knew that, Or I could, become a barfly at the local VFW, but that it seemed like a productive way to go.
Lauren Cardillo:
And you were too young for that?
Dale Dye:
Yeah. Right. Right. So I said, look, let me let me just give it a couple of weeks more. I was about to give up, frankly. I'd run out of money, and I was couch surfing around L.A. with old buddies, and, no, I couldn't get anybody really buy into my theory. You know, they said, look, we've been making war movies for years, and we've made zillions of dollars without some clown like you coming in and telling us we got it wrong.
Dale Dye:
So go away. And, And I was about to, but, I had learned to read the trade papers, Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and I, I came across this little, announcement. Really, I think it was in Daily Variety. That said, I heretofore relatively unknown writer director by the name of Oliver Stone, is going to do a movie based on his own experience as a combat infantryman in Vietnam.
Dale Dye:
And I said, oh, yeah, there it is. If I can just find this guy, if I can just get him to listen to why, why I think most war movies are bad and how we can make a good one. He'll buy it because he's been there.
Dale Dye:
Well, through some machinations that I really shouldn't tell you about because the statute of limitations may not have run out yet. I managed to get in with Stone for about five minutes, and I had to make my pitch. He was cutting another movie. They'd made at that time. And we were somewhere against a studio on Hollywood Boulevard, and, and I pitched him, I said, look, you and I know, that the only way an actor is going to have any inkling of what we went through or who we were when we were 19 in the jungle.
Dale Dye:
He's got to be there. We've got to give him those touchstones. We've got to give him that experience, at least to the extent that he has an insight that he can understand it. And so I, I left and I said, well, I, you know, I've, I've blown it. This guy didn't give me much reaction at all.
Dale Dye:
And then a couple of days later, I, in fact, I was packing up. But a couple of days later, he called as the producer called me and said, look, Oliver wants another meeting. I think he likes what you had to tell it. We had another meeting. And, the upshot of all of this was that he gave me 33 actors, mostly unknowns at the time Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker, Tom Berenger, Johnny Depp.
Dale Dye:
And he said, take him to the jungle. You got three weeks. And, if you do what you need to do, do whatever you do. But when you bring him down out of the jungle, they better be who you and I were when we were 19, in Vietnam. And, I mean, that's mission type orders. That. Now I'm the teacher, now I'm the professor.
Dale Dye:
And, And I loved it. And I took those people up, and beat the hell out of them. Just as we we'd been beaten in combat. They worked night and day. They only twice a day. Unless they pissed me off. And then they only once a day. And I just wore them out. I reduced them to the lowest common denominator and then built from that the attitudes and the insights that we got from when we were young men in combat.
Dale Dye:
And so we brought that little 5 million, $5 million was all we had. And that was chump change. We brought that little movie home, started showing it around, and lo and behold, it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. That was platoon, by the way. And, and best director for Oliver. And he was gracious enough at the Academy Awards to have me stand and recognize me as the guy who contributed greatly to the success of the film.
Dale Dye:
That was an epiphany to me, as we began to do press appearances and that sort of thing about the film, I would find more and more Vietnam veterans in the audience and. And they would tell me, look, I've I've been in the closet for years. I wouldn't talk about Vietnam. I wouldn't talk about wouldn't tell my kids, my wife.
Dale Dye:
And then came platoon and I. That was an opportunity for me to say, look, this experience is why I don't want to talk about it. And and what I noted, what the real epiphany was.
Dale Dye:
A film like that is able to real really influence, societal change. Now that I didn't realize that I thought of films primarily as entertainment on one hand and perhaps a little bit of education, but I didn't realize the vast impact they can have. Until we did, platoon and I started to see these vets coming up to me and saying, look, man, thanks for doing that.
Dale Dye:
Because it was the only chance I had to really talk about my experience. And I had learned.
Lauren Cardillo:
That making that make you feel when they came up to you, because, I mean, the code is not to talk about it. So how did it make you feel?
Dale Dye:
I was humbled, frankly, and I'm I'm very serious about that. That's not false ego. I said, oh, my God, I've got a tiger by the tail here. And this time not screw it up. And so, I began to say, look, if, if, if films that I work on can have that kind of impact, I better do them right, and I better get serious about this, and I better work with some serious directors.
Dale Dye:
And, you know, it's it's been an uphill, since then. I mean, I've done saving private Ryan, Forrest Gump, Band of Brothers, the Pacific and Masters of the air, and on and on and on. And each of those, is more than just a checkmark on their resume. I, I think each of those is is an opportunity.
Dale Dye:
And this is this is really what drives me. I think I'm committed to show some much deserved and long overdue light on the service and sacrifice of our military people, regardless of the era. And I've always sort of kept that in my mind. Do that. If you don't do anything else, don't do that and don't screw it up.
Dale Dye:
So that's kind of it's kind of been my my lodestone. I've, I've touched as we've gone through.
Lauren Cardillo:
How the actors reacted to the idea that I'm going to go to a boot camp and do something I've never done before, although I may not like it.
Dale Dye:
It's it's become a sort of apocryphal among the among the community of actors now you've been to is boot camp. Oh, I was there. And, you know, the word gets around that community, and a lot of it's nonsense. But they love to tell stories anyway. Look, I think, I think for the most part, young male and female actors, incidentally, grow up in a sort of a bubble.
Dale Dye:
They grow up in a, in a lifestyle that is centered and focused on them. That's understandable. It's not right. It's not proper, but it's understandable. And so they love a challenge, you know, can I do this? Can I do something that's out of the ordinary? And I show them that they can.
Lauren Cardillo:
Once again, you're listening to Dale die on Unstoppable Stories. If you want to hear more stories like Dale's, don't forget to like or subscribe. Following that idea. What? What the what are the details you'd like that the audience gets that maybe they didn't get before from Saving Private Ryan or Platoon. You know, things that you presented.
Dale Dye:
You know, I don't know, because I've been I've been driven by this, this business of, trying to show people that, military people, first responders, people who are involved in what what I'd say is a calling rather than a job. Those are great, selfless people, and need to be appreciated. And so I push, to recognize that, and it's very hard because we're all kind of wrapped around our personal axle, you know, am I going to make them mortgage this month or, you know, where's my next meal going to come from?
Dale Dye:
And and it varies by degree. Human nature forces us all to, to to think about meat first. And I like to think, I know, that there are people among us should think of me. Second, and who think of you first. And so I try to convey that message if I can. I do try to find subtle ways to get that into the film and TV projects that I do.
Dale Dye:
Something that demonstrates that these are people who are devoted to you, to our society, to worldwide good and worldwide safety. And that's sometimes very hard to do, without being overt about it. You got to kind of sneak it in there sometimes. But that's one of the things I'm very interested in communicating.
Lauren Cardillo:
I mean, it's, you know, both platoon, but especially Saving Private Ryan did that. It's like we're in pursuit of one person.
Dale Dye:
I hope so, yeah. Ryan, and listen, I'm taking no credit for this. That's Steven Spielberg's brilliance. And writer Robert Redford, who wrote it? But I help in training Tom Hanks and the other actors and and and getting them to understand what was behind the words, that were written for these World War Two Rangers.
Dale Dye:
And so I think my contribution and things like Saving Private Ryan, all the staging, that opening sequence, D-Day, was pretty spectacular. But I think my contribution is, is giving those actors, the ability to, interpret what wrote it had written and which field work was demanding. I gave them an insight, a way to interpret that properly, as selfless human being.
Dale Dye:
And they did it.
Lauren Cardillo:
I think that take me back to that opening scene for a moment, because obviously you were not at D-Day, but it's it's insane and crazy. What were you feeling like watching it happen? You know, helping it?
Dale Dye:
Well, I tell you, I got my General Eisenhower fix that day, watching D-Day unspool. And I had staged it. I'd set it all up, and I think we had a thousand men, 14 armored vehicles and seven ships at sea. And I was controlling them all on one radio. So I was busy that day, but but looking down from the cliff where I was actually overseeing it, and seeing unspool, seeing it happen, was was fabulous.
Dale Dye:
Was was my own insight, into how this must have been. And I can remember, we had trained everybody that was there, and we used a lot of the Irish Guard or Irish, reserve forces, and I had taught them all how to load and fire these weapons, and we gave them enough ammunition so that they could reload, because the last thing I knew, once we blew the whistle on this puppy that you can say cut all day long, they're not going to cut till they're out of ammo.
Dale Dye:
And I just Spielberg and I said, let us make sure we got enough film because they're not going to stop. And they didn't. And I got, I got a sense of the power of it all, the majesty, if you will. And that's that's a difficult word. But the majesty that must have been demonstrated on June 6th, 1944, when those people came ashore, and I think that was another epiphany for me.
Dale Dye:
I said, okay, this is why you're doing this. Now do it again and don't screw it up.
Lauren Cardillo:
Was there more than one take?
Dale Dye:
No, not on that. There wasn't no right. Listen, that was a master. And that's our. Are you going to get POW. And so Spellberg knew that, and he set it up so that he could he could then drive in for coverage on the things that he observed in, in the master shot. And he did, brilliantly, I might add.
Lauren Cardillo:
And so how did you get roped into also acting, though? I mean, what was that like on your bingo card? Like, I want to be a writer. I want to be authentic. And now I'm going to act.
Dale Dye:
You know, I don't know, I'm not sure I ever really had that in mind. But I discovered once I began to do it that that's another itch that I could scratch, a creative itch. The truth is, I kind of got shanghaied into it. Oliver Stone had seen me running this unit that I built, for him for chair, and he saw me issuing orders and doing this and chewing, but doing this sort of thing.
Dale Dye:
And I think he watched that for a while, and he said, why? Why would I hire some New York actor to be the company commander when this guy already is and he shows it? And so he pitched to me, and he said, look, I want you to be Captain Harris. I want you to be the company commander as well.
Dale Dye:
I am the no, no, no, no, I want you to be on camera as a company commander. And I said, well, wait a minute, man. You know, I'm I'm about as ugly as a hedge fence and and and I don't know how to do this. And what are you talking about? I said, look, we're going to dye your hair.
Dale Dye:
I've always been white headed. It sure would dye your hair a little bit. And then you're going to do exactly what you would do as a company commander in this particular situation. Never mind the cameras. Just ignore them and do what you do. Pay attention to the guys. And so, I was encouraged by, Tom Berenger and, and Willem Dafoe and, and, Mark Wolfe and a few others.
Dale Dye:
And they said, look, you can do this, man. Just treat us like you treat us, you know? And so I did that, and and the, I was lucky that the, the critics, in reviewing the film sort of picked that up. So we don't know who this guy is, but he's pretty good. And so, that kind of launched an acting career.
Dale Dye:
And, and I kind of approached it the same way that, I approach being an advisor. Here's an opportunity. If I do it right, to demonstrate devotion to duty, selflessness, professionalism, that sort of thing. And, look, I that's worked pretty well. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm the most typecast guy in Hollywood. And it used to be me and Lee Ermey were the two most typecast guys in Hollywood before Lee, God bless him, is passed on.
Dale Dye:
So it's now it's me, I love it.
Lauren Cardillo:
So go back for a second. Last year, was it Masters of the air?
Dale Dye:
Yeah. That's that was the most recent series.
Lauren Cardillo:
Right. So that's like a whole new crop of actors. We're talking aviation as well. Yeah. Did you have to adapt anything, you know, was, was your your methods still there, you know, to to work with them. Sure.
Dale Dye:
Look, it was a little more, mental and academic than it was when I'm teaching an infantry outfit. But you can probably see behind me. We have it. We have a library of about 11,000 books. And, and I regularly am in the middle of them. I mean, so I do research on all aspects. I mean, I like to say that, my outfit, which called Warriors Global, will do anything, whether it's from Star Wars to the Peloponnesian War, you name it, I'll do it.
Dale Dye:
But that requires research. And Masters of the air certainly did. You know, I've never been an aviator. I had an uncle who was a B-17 crewman in, in, Europe, and my executive officer, Mike Stookey, who's been with me for 50 years, by the way, had a dad who was a B-29 pilot in the war.
Dale Dye:
So we kind of got our heads together and figured out how we were going to teach this stuff. And, and we they had built I mean, this is an impressive project. They had built two full scale B-17s, and we were shooting over in England. So we were able to train on those aircraft. They didn't fly, but they didn't need to.
Dale Dye:
You were inside that aluminum sausage and off you went. So we've we've done all sorts of things and, and, and our, our basic assumption is that the spirit of a warrior, the spirit of a soldier never changes. You know, the weapons change the war, change, the politics change. But the spirit, the heart of that soldier is the same.
Dale Dye:
And he's a human being, and he's liable to do just exactly what he did in 1775, is what he'll do in 2025. So we kind of use that as a, as a, a bearing mark. And, and it's been it's been great. Although, we did Masters of the Air in England, and I was over a year, and it was in the middle of the Covid nonsense.
Dale Dye:
So everything was, you know, it was like pulling teeth just to get on the set. So that was difficulty. But we we persevere.
Lauren Cardillo:
Yes. So say you meet a young filmmaker today who wants to make a film about a military action, a.
Dale Dye:
War.
Lauren Cardillo:
And they don't have a huge budget. What would be your advice, the things that you've learned over time about how to make it authentic? Besides hiring you?
Dale Dye:
Look, the neat thing about technology nowadays is you don't need all of the expensive trappings of moviemaking. My advice would be break out your cellphone, shoot that puppy, and then start showing it to people. Post it online. And along with doing that, say, and by the way, I've got this great story and script that I'd like to get going, but what what do you have to understand about Hollywood or moviemaking, filmmaking in general, wherever it is around the world, it's a closed club.
Dale Dye:
It's a little small fraternity, usually fraternity, although there's sorority elements to it because there's so much money involved. And we're talking about astronomical amounts of money, and nobody wants to share that. They want it all. So they want to let you in. And so you're going to you're going to go through a period where your tenacity, your dedication to telling that story on film is going to be sorely tested.
Dale Dye:
And and you got to stick with it. If you're not prepared to do that, do something else.
Lauren Cardillo:
Are there some projects that you have sort of kept close to you that you'd still like to do?
Dale Dye:
Yeah, yeah, there are there's a couple. I've got a, I've got a World War Two story, from Europe, about the battle for Lafayette air, in Normandy that I want to do. And it's written and I've had it sold 2 or 3 times, and it's fallen through. I want to do that. I also want to do a story about Korea.
Dale Dye:
I've written a book called The Korean, Odyssey, and, that book needs to be interpreted on film, and I want to do that. But, you know, I'm, I'm getting a little aging now. And I've still got one more to do. In Australia. I leave next month. So many people want me to do so many other things that they're stuff that it's sometimes hard to do my own.
Dale Dye:
And, and I haven't had a lot of success with it, but we'll see.
Lauren Cardillo:
Do you do you have a favorite film that you worked on? And maybe it's not because it won an Oscar or something else that's just that just affected you, you know, personally in a way that you're like this experience was the best, you know, do you have one of those or they're all great?
Dale Dye:
Well, there's a bunch of them. But if we if we disregard the Oscar winners and the Emmy letters, I particularly enjoyed working on, a film called the Rough Riders, which was made for TNT. John Milius directing, with Tom Berenger playing Jerry Rose, who helped me playing, Leonard Wood, his boss, and, and all of the every Western character in the world, Sam Elliott and a few others.
Dale Dye:
It showed up in that film, and that was that was a lot of fun. We shot from, West Texas all the way across the state to San Antonio on location. And it was it was like a traveling circus. And, and I started to understand how people could run away from home and join the circus. So I enjoyed that one.
Dale Dye:
That was a lot of fun. But they've all been fun in their own ways. And it's it's difficult to single out anything particular.
Lauren Cardillo:
Are there are there mistakes that you made along the way just because you were new at it? You know.
Dale Dye:
There mistakes.
Lauren Cardillo:
That, that you now go, oh.
4;17;14 - 4;47;14
Dale Dye:
Yeah. Oh, there's a bunch of those, you know, I let my ego get in the way a couple of times, lost jobs because I shut my fat mouth off and and, so, yeah, there have been mistakes. I've made, but I think I think what's if there's a quality that comes to that. I do understand that when you make mistakes, the key is not to repeat them and to learn from them.
Dale Dye:
And I'm pretty good at that.
Lauren Cardillo:
Because I'm sure there are parts of you look back at Platoon or Saving Private Ryan and you're like, I wish I could have done that a little bit different. But it was. It worked for the time.
Dale Dye:
Look, there's thousands of those instances. And the interesting part is, not only do I see them, there's usually some small detail that I've screwed up or ignored or something. Not only do I see them, but everybody who has a computer sees them and and immediate, you know, I'm accessible by email and stuff. So I'll get hundreds of you know, that these the color of the stitching on the uniform was.
Dale Dye:
Well, either I didn't know or I forgot about it or something. And, and so yeah, there are some people out there that, you know, the kind of guys who who wear, the, the remote controls pause button completely wear it. And they go through my films and they, they just, cheer me up here.
Lauren Cardillo:
Here's a last question for you. If that person who got out of the Marines in 1984 saw where you have come. Now, what does that almost how many years can I do math? 40 years later? What would they say? I mean, what would they what would there be their reaction be to what you have become?
Dale Dye:
I think they'd probably say, who the hell are you? And how did you, Look, I spent a lot of time. This is an example of it. I spend a lot of time talking about that sort of thing. I've got at least two appearances I've got to make in the next two weeks, where I'm going to be talking to audiences about this sort of thing.
Dale Dye:
And I do that because I believe, that if you prepare yourself well, if you're a military person, don't get stuck in the military mud. Yeah. You have to know a lot about it. Yeah, you have to study it. Yeah, I have to learn how to perform and physically train yourself and mentally train yourself. But there's a whole world out there, and.
Dale Dye:
And it behooves you to become familiar with a bit of it. The neat thing about college education is that you can focus your interest. It's not like general overall education, like you get in secondary school or primary school. You can focus on what you particularly are interested in or what you particularly want to do. And so I'd urge young people who want to do something like what I want to do, to have two things, to have a broad based interest in everything that goes on around you, because you never can tell where there is story out there.
Dale Dye:
And to be tenacious, have a goal in mind. Know what that goal is? Focus. Hard. Strip away the crapola and find out what the dual is. Where is it? I really want to go. What is it I really want to do? And then go for that and an institution like, Maryland, gives you the opportunity to do that, and it gives you the opportunity to do that while you're trying to make a living or, you know, trying to serve your country.
Dale Dye:
So take advantage of it.
Lauren Cardillo:
So if you, you ended up where you wanted to go was even more than you imagined.
Dale Dye:
Look, I don't think I don't think there's the ultimate final touchdown. What happens interestingly, is that you think, okay, now, if I just do this, I'm going to have made the, you know, won the gold medal. Now, what happens is you get there and say, boy, that was cool, but how about this? And then next thing you know you've got some other goal develops and you and that's, you know, the cycle of life and and in my view it's a cycle of creativity.
Dale Dye:
And I like that.
Lauren Cardillo:
Well, Dale, thanks so much for joining us tonight. I love listening to your stories about the military, because I got some of that from my dad. And also movies, you know, and for everybody listening, watching, please remember to like and subscribe if you want to hear more unstoppable stories just like this, you can even catch up on previous podcasts on your preferred podcast channel.
Lauren Cardillo:
So Dale, thanks so much. Good luck on the next shoot.
Dale Dye:
Thank you Lawrence. My pleasure. It was nice talking to you.
Lauren Cardillo:
Nice talking to you.