Richard Boyle: ‘lf you get down, they’ll shoot’

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 26

Richard Boyle: ‘lf you get down, they’ll shoot’

BRENT LEWIS, an Auckland writer, spoke with Richard Boyle — the reporter and photographer whose work in Central America is at the centre of the film “Salvador” — in England earlier this year. He says that Boyle is a staccato-like talker:

Oliver Stone, the director of "Salvador,” says the problem with journalist characters in films such as “Under Fire” and "The Killing Fields” is that they “had no personal flaws.” “They were dignified, they were liberal and they were somewhat noble.” By contrast, Richard Boyle is ■ frazzled, foul-mouthed and disreputable. He is also a man of rare and conviction. Tena- ■ clous and utterly unreasonable, he has a nose for cover-ups and a bloodhound’s instinct for following that smell, no matter

how rancid. Still more impressive, he is no fictional creation. Boyle, a self-described war specialist, co-wrote “Salvador” with Oliver Stone. Like Stone, he was in Vietnam, covering the war as as a foreign correspondent. Yet Boyle insists there was one vital difference between him and his colleagues: he was revealing the truth which they were actively trying to suppress. “Most of the network guys in ’Nam would just hang around the officers’ club. They wouldn’t dream of smoking a joint with the grunts. Yet the grunts knew

the real stories and because they trusted me they would tip me) off,” he says. Which is how he learned about fragging — the practice by which soldiers would toss grenades into their officers’ tents or shoot them in the back, blaming such acts of murder on the Viet Cong. “When I broke that story, there was no way the networks could keep it quiet. Eventually, they followed suit.” In America, they call such tactics “hardball.” It’s something in which Boyle is an expert. “Boyle is quite a character,” says Stone, “the kind of guy who lives close to the edge. He created so much mayhem that he was kicked out of Vietnam but he hasn’t changed his ways. I can’t see him lying down even when he’s six feet under.” Boyle has never cut his style to fit with what is acceptable yet his track record in getting strong stories out is better than colleagues who are obsessed by niceties. Is it possible that stirring things up might interfere with his ability to get a story? “It’s probably true,” he says with candour, his words spluttering into laughter. “For example, when I shot ‘EI Salvador Under The Volcano,’ a 90-minute television documentary, there were lots of problems which I dealt with head-on, yet I was able to use such moments to illustrate the reality of that situation. There’s the moment when some Right-wing goon says ‘Don’t take pictures’ and his hand smothers the camera.” For all his rabble rousing, Boyle is a righteous man whose survival is something of a miracle. Anyone who doesn’t get the message when his house is firebombed is difficult to warn off.

Boyle shrugs this off, as he does the time when he was beaten up by a Salvadorean death squad. He is angrier about the time his film was stolen, because that could not be replaced. His life is not simply a journalist’s journey. He has lent his vagrant talents to managing a Florence night club, working as a youth counsellor for ghetto children and serving as national security adviser to Congressman Paul McCloskey, a dissident Republican who tried to impeach. Richard Nixon for widening the war in Vietnam to Cambodia. Richard Boyle chronicled his Vietnam experiences in a book, “Flower of the Dragon,” and in a five-part television series. He saw the Yom Kippur War in Israel and the fall of Somoza, in Nicaragua and in “Salvador” gloats about being “the last guy out of Cambodia when (Sidney) Schanberg (of Killing Fields fame) was in New York sipping champagne and getting a PulPrize To Boyle, the thrill of covering wars “is like an adrenalin rush. It’s like having a box seat to history.” There is a cost. At 45, he looks a decade older. He feels like a lone survivor. He has lost most of the friends he started out with in Vietnam in the mid-60s; some died getting the story out. More than 30 journalists were killed in El Salvador. Some were victims of Government snipers “so there are dangers not only from the odd, angry shot but from people trying to kill you,” he says, insisting that four Dutch journalists died that way despite official claims that they were killed in crossfire: “That’s not true... I saw their bodies, which had powder burns, so they were executed at close range.”

Boyle could have met the same fate. He says he owes his survival to “an ability to duck.” “When somebody is holding a gun on you, the first rule is not to get down on the ground. It’s a

psychological thing. You just keep talking, saying you’re a friend of the general or whatever comes into your mind, but if you get down on the ground they’ll shoot you. I’ve seen it

happen many times.” With the completion of “Salvador,” Boyle went to the Philippines to advise on Oliver Stone’s “Platoon.” “My most important work was harassing the actors — blowing them up,: ambushing them and shooting them with blanks so that by the time the film started they didn’t look like kids out of Sunset Boulevard, but real grunts who’d been in the jungle.”

Richard Boyle talks about the “four rules of photo-journalism. One: you take the picture. Two: you live .to take the picture. Three: you smuggle the film out somehow. Four: you get the picture) published. Generally, hardest bit.”: What is the going rate? “$l5 a picture,” he says with.a grin. Richard Boyle is not a millionaire, but then, that never was the point.