Word: conge
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...Everyone has reached a state of exalted cynicism. "Welcome to Viet Nam, the Movie," Joker sneers to an American camera crew. "You think we waste gooks for freedom?" says the Marine called Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin). Crazy Earl (Kieron Jecchins), who poses next to a sprawling Viet Cong corpse, pays ironic tribute to the enemy: "After we rotate back to the world, we're gonna miss not havin' anybody around worth shootin'." Later, when he picks off a couple of V.C. like fairground ducks, his face creases in a smile of dread...
...greatest weakness could be the nature of their great-power patron. It could be that the U.S. does not have the patience to support the incremental struggle that is guerrilla war. And the contras certainly cannot win without outside support. Very few guerrilla armies do. Not even the Viet Cong...
...work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center, it was sibling riflery. Stone's achievement is to pound and hack this theme into a ripping yarn about a good man, an evil man and an Everyman -- a young, romanticized Oliver Stone -- suspended between them...
...skirmish less than a mile from the Cambodian border. "They hit us with about 5,000 troops that night. They laid bombs right on top of us; we dropped bombs right on them. It's possible that our high command was using us as bait to draw the ! Viet Cong out so we could inflict heavy casualties. We lost about 25 dead and 175 wounded; we killed about 500 of them. Their bodies were scraped up by bulldozers, just like in the movie. For that battle our platoon was on the inner perimeter, but two weeks later we went back...
...that the cause of the war was morally suspect. "They sent me off to some foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man." Springsteen, whose first drummer died in Vietnam, recognizes the senseless tragedy of the war. "I had a brother at Khe Sahn / Fighting off the Viet Cong / They're still there / He's all gone...