I didn’t find it insulting. I did not come away with a negative view of Vietnam Vets after seeing those two films.
That’s because you weren’t there. You didn’t see what we saw, or go through what we went through. I can still see those guys like it happened yesterday.
Anybody with real talent could have made a terrific movie about the war we experienced but nobody was interested in showing what it was really like.
One small example: a real firefight is stunning. They start with a couple of fast, panicked shots and quickly goes to a thunderous roar as hundreds of weapons fire as fast as they can be fired. Every few seconds, a steel-door slam of grenades going off . It’s stunning, dizzying, overwhelming. Tracers (red) going out and tracers (green) coming in. The firefights were so intense that if you weren’t in the middle of it, you couldn’t intervene. You had to wait until the volume of fire slowed down to get near to help.
The real thing was hellish and the young men who lived through it and coped with it were superb Americans. Too bad nobody had the talent or motivation to show our war as it really was.