Word: platoonic
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First came the motorcycle outriders, then jeeps, trucks and buses crammed with grim, steel-helmeted East German troops. Rattling in their wake were the tanks--squat Russian-built T-34s and T-54s. At each major intersection, a platoon peeled off and ground to a halt, guns at the ready. The rest headed on for the sector border, the 25-mile frontier that cuts through the heart of Berlin like a jagged piece of glass. As the troops arrived at scores of border points, cargo trucks were already unloading rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts, wooden horses, stone blocks, picks...
That prospect seemed increasingly likely as the day wore on. The Compugraphic was, after all, the essential link in a production process that, looking back, seems only slightly more advanced than waiting for a platoon of monks to produce an illuminated manuscript...
Essentially, however, it's business as usual in Starship Troopers. Basic training is still brutal. The platoon we follow from the first day of enlistment to battlefield apotheosis contains many familiar types--supermacho drill sergeant, dopey yokel and, at its center, Johnny (Casper Van Dien, a newcomer with a useful, uncanny resemblance to the old B-picture star John Agar), who is the traditional spoiled and aimless kid. He has--need one say?--joined up for the wrong, selfish reasons, but when his hometown is destroyed, Pearl Harbor-style, he embraces the right, vengeful-idealistic rationales for merciless slaughter...
...star fleet. This gives director Paul Verhoeven, always a coldly calculating craftsman, and writer Ed Neumeier, adapting a Robert A. Heinlein novel, a chance to satirize old-fashioned aerial-combat movies too. Johnny also has a frustrated high school admirer, Dizzy (Dina Meyer), who lands in his platoon, finally gets his attention and then heroically dies. This gives the filmmakers a chance to strike that note of romantic self-sacrifice--death transfigured--that is integral to movies of this kind...
...Park Avenue in front of the school, stood with fixed bayonets on corners a block away in each direction... A jeep rolled through the barricade at 16th Street and Park Avenue, followed by an Army station wagon and another jeep. The Negroes piled out of the station wagon. Three platoons came on the double across the school grounds, deployed in strategic positions. Another platoon lined up on either side of the Negroes, escorted them inside the building... [Once there the] Negro children reported that they were well treated... During the noon hour, a white boy and girl, both school leaders...