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Band of Brothers: Too close for comfort, The Guardian, September 24, 2001

Band of Brothers: Too close for comfort

The Guardian
24 September 2001
by Matt Seaton, The Guardian, September 24, 2001

With talk of the US drafting men to fight its ‘crusade’ against terrorism, the second world war mini-series, Band Of Brothers, has suddenly become all too relevant. Matt Seaton reports from the set

Captain Dye of the US Marine Corps stubs out another Marlboro and pauses to consider the question of what he did when he retired after 22 years of military service.

“The mafia wasn’t hiring,” he says dryly, “so I went to LA.”

If you saw Dale Dye on the set of a war movie, you’d laugh and say to yourself, “Boy, that one’s straight out of Central Casting!” He is tall and angular, with craggy features and bristling silver-white hair (moustache to match). To describe his voice as gravelly is hilarious understatement; it’s the sort of voice that can only be achieved by years of dedicated smoking and whiskey-drinking.

By the way, no one calls him “Dale”. It’s “Capt Dye”, at all times. Even though he is on the set of a movie.

“I came out to LA in 1985,” he drawls, “full of naivety. I became convinced I could apply everything I’d learned in the US Marine Corps to the training of actors and the making of movies.”

He read somewhere that Oliver Stone was making Platoon and – “like a marine on a mission” – found a way of buttonholing him.

“Oliver and I sort of hit it off,” he says. “We’re yin and yang: the mad-dog conservative and the even madder-dog liberal. But we liked each other; we’re close friends.”

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