Few American filmmakers have careers as wild and successful as three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone. And even fewer do it on their own terms as Stone did — forging an unapologetically left-wing cinema right in the heart of Reagan-Bush-Clinton Hollywood.

Now that cinematic scourge of the powers that be has a new memoir out. Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game recounts the writer-director’s life and career, from Stone’s childhood in New York City up through his classic and controversial work in Hollywood in the mid-1980s. And for the first time ever, Stone delves into his personal experiences as a combat soldier in Vietnam, out of which exploded movies that joined the ranks of the silver screen’s greatest antiwar masterpieces.

In 1979, he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express, his first of three Academy Awards. But it was in 1986 — the year Stone turned forty and where his memoir ends — that the filmmaker truly came into his own as an auteur. It was the year Stone directed two of his own original screenplays, Salvador (co-written by Richard Boyle) and Platoon. The scripts for both films were nominated for Academy Awards in the same year, but Stone instead won the Oscar for Best Director for Platoon, based largely on his own experiences as an infantryman in the Vietnam War.