Posted on 05/10/2007 8:19:21 PM PDT by Philistone
So I'm watching Platoon on demand for about the 15th time.
I saw it the first time in a theater when it first came out with a former army grunt. The fact that I was a snot nosed, 24 year-old white boy who'd never been in the service and he was a 50 year-old black engineer had nothing to do with it. He told me he used to go out on patrol with no food or water so he could carry more guns and ammo. He wasn't going down without a fight.
Walking out, he told me "that's EXACTLY what it was like."
All I could think about was how HOLLYWOOD the whole film was (the guy who reads the letter from his mom only to get blown up in the next scene, The good vs evil Sargeants, etc.)
I'd be interested in hearing from some other vets as to their reaction to this film.
I've read first-person accounts of combat where the guy being interviewed would say something like "it's hot, you're tired, you're pissed off, the gooks' eyes are slanty and you just don't like it, so you shoot them".
I thought Hamburger Hill wa better.
A defining Nam pic hasn’t been made yet.
Stone’s ‘Sea of Grass’ was a more realistic treatment.
Tommy Lee jones was excellent, it portrayed the trauma of
survival much better, amazingly his vietnamese wife adapted
while he ended up blowing his brains out naked in a VW bus.
I never served.
I read, and remember to this day, Micheal Herr’s “Dispatches” which was part of the basis for “Apocalypse Now”.
My problem with Platoon is that it was advertised as “The Most Real Account of Fighting in ‘Nam”, which may have been true (at the time, we’d had Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter) but it all seems very contrived.
And since we’ve seen what Oliver Stone is capable of, I just wanted to know what real vets thought... then and now.
I have seen interviews with WW 2 combat vets who said “Saving Private Ryan” was the most realistic combat film ever made followed by Viet Nam war film “Full Metal Jacket”.
I was not in ‘Nam. But I worked with a guy who claimed to serve with Oliver Stone. This guy said Stone wounded himself and fellow soldiers by accidentally discharging a grenade launcher. Draw your own conclusions.
My old platoon sargeant Max (SF, 2 tours in Viet Nam) said Apocalypse Now was just like it.
I was in the US Navy, sea going that is. BUT, a good friend was an Air Cobra pilot, purple heart, bronze star so he’s been there, done that. I think he’s seen just about every VN era flick produced. His all time favorite for accuracy of details, attitudes, spirit and the amazing perseverence of soldiers in particular is “We Were Soldiers”.
He’s also read the book, which is more complete of course but the film version is tops for him. That’s good enough for me too.
A buddy that was “brown water Navy” (Mekong Delta, riverine patrol—Operation Game Warden, also purple heart, bronze star w/V device) agree with the opinion on “We Were Soliers”, especially the terrible feeling of sudden, random death.
Apocolypse Now was pukesville for him, as well as myself and we were looking anxiously for a Navy flick dealing with riverine patrol combat. Darn! You wanted opinions, ya got ‘em!
I don't think that I ever saw a senior NCO or officer after dark. They left us alone because of the fear of being fragged. The hootch scene was real, I lived it, with the dope and music. Platoon was a little overdone, but every scene in the movie happened, at least once. BTW, I arrived at age 18, had two birthdays and came home age 20. It was a war fought by teenagers, and we were good troops, but at times a little messed up. Remember, we had no phones to call home. We had no email. It pretty much sucked.
I understand completely.
I just think that with very little effort, one could update Apocalypse Now to the war in Iraq.
I will never forget the scene where Brando is describing the efforts to innoculate some children and the VC come back hours later and “hack off the arms of all those children... Give me a division of men like those I can win the war...”
We are still fighting the same instincts, I think. We can’t win against an enemy that kills children... We just don’t have the inhumanity for it.
I worked for a guy one time that spent 4 tours over there with the Marines. He was an Arkansas stump jumper that had never seen television until he got to boot camp. He was in the motor pool, and their favorite diversion was to drive a truck out into Ambush Alley and back. The guy that collected the most bullet holes was the winner. I think this guy really missed Vietnam since it was so much better than where he came from. :0)
Michael Herr wrote much of Captain Willard’s narration in A.N. The scene at the Do Lung Bridge where a soldier named Roach kills a sniper with a mortar was taken from Dispatches.
Herr’s vision of Vietnam was a psychadelic rock and roll fueled acid trip.
I was born in 1960. My memories of the Viet-Nam war consist of asking my mother when I was six “why are NORTH Americans fighting for the SOUTH Vietnamese?” Unfortunately, her answer was “I don’t know”.
The rest of my news came from covers of Time or Newsweek which were more interested in covering Hippies than what was happening “over there”.
I didn’t really become interested in politics (and become a conservative) until Carter wanted to re-institute the draft.
That’s when I seriously started studying the war...
Don't succumb to the political BS about VN, for one thing. For another, assume every VN vet had an experience unique to him, and a movie is necessarily a distillation of many lives. I watched "Platoon", back when it came out, with a group of VN vets and met with a group of them afterwards. Most could identify with one character or another but nobody could identify with the story as a whole.
I think it is way past time to be worrying about thirty-year -old movies, and begin to deal with the present crises.
“We can’t win against an enemy that kills children..’
And if that isn’t bad enough, there is no real defense against someone who wants to kill himself while killing you.
Trust me, I do.
Unfortunately, the films that kids watch influence how they view the world, and their role in it.
I still think that Oliver Stone got away with his propaganda because he included a lot of scenes that Vets could relate to.
This gave him the stepping stone (no pun intended) that he needed...
That, I think we can handle. Just shoot them first.
But when they advance with their kids in front of them...
It’s too bad that this war isn’t happening 60 years ago. We’d just carpet bomb their communities until they surrendered.
Can’t do that today, though.
I'm STILL waiting for a WWII film that shows it as it REALLY was early in the Pacific Theatre: Incompetant (really poorly trained) junior officers getting themselves and their men killed by the hundreds, even on a destroyer such as the one my grandfather served on. I got news for you folks, WWII wasn't all about "greatness." It was about a bunch of young men, a flaccid middle officer corp, a GREEN junior officer corp, who miraculously managed to get their sh-t together and defeat the two most powerful armies/navies in the world at that time.
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