Word: platooner
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WRITER MICHAEL HERR finished up his psychedelic memoir of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, with an odd chant: "Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there." He was wrong. If it was anything like what is depicted in Oliver Stone's Platoon, we had no idea...
...release and immediate acclaim for Platoon, although welcome, is no surprise. Over the past five or six years, the American public has finally, slowly, begun to remember the Vietnam War. The last American troops were withdrawn in 1973, Saigon fell in 1975, and the public consciousness repressed it like some horrible trauma of childhood. It took nearly a decade for the undeclared statute of limitations on the guilt to run out; only then could we call the veterans out of the cellar, and give them their due of parades and memorials...
Fortunately, as the reception of Platoon shows, there is a market for the truth. Writer-Director Stone was there, for a 15-month tour which won him two wounds, a silver star and the memories he now brings to paying audiences. There have been other powerful films about Vietnam, including The Deer Hunter and the semi-surreal masterpiece Apocalypse Now. But unlike those films, Platoon is at its best when it forgets "art" and acts as eyewitness...
...story is simple: a single infantry platoon operates near the Cambodian border in 1968. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), standing in for Stone, has dropped out of college and volunteered for the Nam, hoping to prove his manhood and his self-worth on the field of honor. The film opens with him joining the platoon clean cut and pale as linen. It ends with him being evacuated, turned black with blood and smoke. The movie is about his transition from one color to another...
There is only the vaguest idea of a military mission to accomplish: from the platoon's point of view, and ours, their only objective is to emerge from the jungle at the end of the day with arms and legs and life intact. Men die in brutal and unexpected ways, booby-trapped, shot from the treeline. The survivors of each attack shake with terror and rage. Their friends die at the hands of an invisible enemy who always seems to be a step ahead...