| SAM ELLIOTT
(Sgt-Major Basil Plumley) on why he took the role:
"It wasn't the size of the part, it was the opportunity to be a
part of something that I thought was really important. I don't look at this as
just another job, or just another war movie; this represents something that
fractured this country more than anything since the Civil War, and I think that
these guys that we're playing and representing in this film got short shrift
for a long time. It's time that they get what's due to them. The nice thing
about it is, because of the current climate, maybe we feel more sympathetic
about the guys in the field today. This is a great time to reconcile a real
wrong that was done to these guys."
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WALLACE
(screenwriter of Braveheart):
"This movie does not seek to lay blame to anyone, and I can tell you that
my personal conviction is that Americans who said, 'Let's get our boys out of
Vietnam,' were all good Americans. All Americans wanted the right thing; there
was just a disagreement about how we should achieve that. This film deals with
the raw reality of what happened to these men and women and how they dealt with
it."
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GREG KINNEAR (Bruce
'Snake' Crandall):
"Bruce Crandall is an amazing guy. He's got a great sense of humor and is
very unassuming. During the three days of this battle, he fought incredibly
heroically and kept the lines running non-stop, continuing to airlift out the
wounded when the Medivacs would no longer go in, because the landing zone got
too hot. He's a real gentleman, and I was honored to play him. He came in and
spoke to the cast and crew, along with some of the other veterans of this war,
the night before we started shooting, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house
as he recounted his personal experience and the loss that he felt over some of
these men who didn't survive."
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 GIBSON:
"Somebody asked, 'Would you die for anything?' You'd take a bullet for
your kids easy - there's no question about it. The selflessness that one
instinctively goes into when it comes to your kids is very like what Hal felt
for all his troops because he was a father. Those guys were his sons and that's
how he regarded them."
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WALLACE:
"It's a movie about humanity. It's a movie about courage and sacrifice.
Certainly, there's a battle in this picture, but I don't think about it as a
war movie, I think of it as a love story."
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