Word: platooner
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Protecting and leading the men of the platoon are the squad sergeants, who, under the obligatory incompetent lieutenant, control the lives and fates of the grunts. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is the idealist, trying to preserve some code of moral behavior at the end of the world. Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a creature of the war, a drawling, scarred, amoral survivor. Both are killers. The only difference is how they go about it. As Chris describes it in one of his voice-over "letter home," the two sergeants fight "for the possession of my soul...
...conflict plays itself out in typical movie fashion, with the villain triumphant and then paying the price. But by the end of the film it doesn't seem to matter. The platoon and its politics are the extent of the universe for these grunts, but amidst all the killing and terror and death, justice, poetic or not, has no meaning...
...Platoon's audience, packing the large theater on a weeknight, still could not quite cope with what they saw. Some cried, some did not. "Nice shooting," laughed one man behind me as Barnes picked off a fleeing civilian. In another scene, Elias runs through the brush, singlehandedly ambushing an enemy squad. "Go, Rambo!" said someone. Eventually, everyone became very quiet...
...office: no one wanted to view our current indiscretions. Although we have come a long way in our intellectual understanding of what happened in Vietnam, there is still a failure to connect the past and the present. Safely enrobed in history, Vietnam cannot hurt us now. Platoon helps to bring it back to the present, to make it real for people who were infants...
Philip Caputo, author of A Rumour of War, commanded a platoon at Danang in 1965. He describes in his book how some of the veterans tried to describe to the inexperienced Marines what it was all about, and how the new recruits refused to listen. "They had already been where we were going, to that frontier between life and death, but none of us wanted to listen to them," Caputo writes. "So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its own war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same illusions, and learn the same...