Early this morning I went out and walked the twenty-minute road from the guest quarters up to the Tech Building here at Skywalker Ranch. The fog hung over the surrounding hilltops and shrouded the redwood trees. Ravens squawked and robins twittered; myriad other birds tweeted, chirped and buzzed. Without binoculars I could not identify the species I was seeing.

Last night Betty and I saw flocks of turkeys. In one flock six poults no bigger than my fist scurried around with the hens and the toms as they foraged their way through the puffed white remnants of dandelion blooms and other various plants that have turned brown and stiff in the summer’s weal. As I watched them I thought how vulnerable they were to skunks, raccoons, foxes, coyotes and the various large raptors that inhabit these coastal redwood ecoregions.

That vulnerability reminded me of what we came here for. To sound mix our film. And the subject matter—the Siege of Khe Sanh—and how we were so like these poults, we young Marines as we hunkered down in our holes and trenches and waited out the constant battering of artillery and mortar and rocket and sniper fire. How we waited to become unlike the poults, these foragers and defenders, to become more like the raptors, these hunters and killers, raiders, shock troops. Move to contact. Search and destroy. How we waited. How we waited, until we could join with the enemy and then the cataclysm, the personal cataclysm, like living the most frightening Old Testament war scenes, Joshua fit the battle of Jericho…stuff like that.

After breakfast Betty and I moved up to the Tech Building and sat in a modern, high tech sound theater and watched Mark Berger and John Nutt work their craft. Patience and skill…each moment had to be perfect. The sound not too loud, but loud enough so that the viewer knows viscerally how savagery feels. Sometimes they skirmished, more often they agreed, about how one thread of sound needed to work with other sounds. The result coaxes and coerces, seduces, cajoles and scares. Betty and I and our daughter Sarah and our son-in-law Baruch sat in leather chairs and couches, as we watched Mark and John work through scene after scene. Later we went up to the main house and after a tour of the library, dined on gourmet chow.

When we left the sound theater this evening, I felt as if I had been assaulted. My stomach hurt and my nerves were shot, frayed like the ends of a nylon parachute rope. The war crouched in the back of my throat, big and blustery, sneering and dangerous.

Soon we will be finished.

Whether speaking metaphorically or literally, the road to Skywalker Ranch is laden with surprises. On a metaphorical plane, Betty and I marvel at the path that led us here . . . the bold idea for the film, the idea’s rapid implementation, but most importantly, the people we have worked with and with whom we will work. Twists and turns and surprises at nearly every juncture, and mostly pleasant, even exhilarating surprises. Like topping a humdrum, dry-season summit and having to catch your breath because of the towering copses of green trees, cacophonous bleats and rattles of wild animals and the chirps and peals of strange birds.

The road to Skywalker itself, the literal one, after turning off US Highway 101, is twisting and turning, up and down, curves masked by groves of live oak, madrone and laurel trees. As we near the Ranch, magnificent stands of Redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens, line both sides of the road. Huge stones jut out of the golden grass of midsummer in this coastal forest ecoregion. The actual gate to Skywalker Ranch is unassuming, almost nondescript. You’d miss it if you didn’t know exactly where you were going.

When we went to San Antonio to interview the majority of the Marines in July 2010, we had no inkling that Skywalker would be one of the final destinations on the road to production of the film. We were sweaty and hot, anticipatory, even a little tremulous as we debarked our flight in San Antonio with Mark Spear and asked our questions, got our answers, got surprised, ate lots of great Mexican food in the ninety-eight-degree heat.

After Texas, when we went to Ann Arbor, Michigan and Washington, DC, or to Brown County, Indiana and Springfield, Illinois, Iowa City, Iowa, Omaha, Nebraska, the surprises continued to rear up and flash their brilliant neons.  Now, after Skywalker, where will the road lead us?

This evening we took a walk to inspect the Skywalker premises. The glass in the windows, the red brick in the Tech Building, the ivy on the walls, huge garden, rush-encircled pond, the veranda on the Main House, the covered bridge, the fitness center, the deer, the wild turkeys, olive trees, cattle, California Bay trees, apricots, corn, sunflowers, the swallows flitting across the skyline as the light from the setting sun striated in vertical lines, the late rays breaking over the top of a western butte. Like knowledge streaming into our brains.

Tomorrow we will begin working with John Nutt and Mark Berger and the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi, lost in the types of moments when Betty and I feel like we are barely holding on to a dream become reality, but the reality is big and broad and smiles like the mouth of the Sacramento as it empties from the Carquinez Straights into San Francisco Bay. After that, whence?