Word: platooning
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Oliver Stone is a muckraker disguised as a moviemaker. He concocts films?Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon as a screenwriter, Salvador and now Platoon as writer-director?whose blood vessels burst with holy indignation. And he gets money for his Savonarola sermons because he films them for peanuts: $5 million for Salvador, $6 million for Platoon. This new one is an up-tempo dirge, an I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, about his experiences as a young grunt in Viet Nam. Stone means the drama, the carnage, the horror, the horror...
...voice belongs to Comrade Victor, 39, the political officer assigned to look after us. (Victor, like all N.P.A. fighters, uses a nom de guerre. The platoon's machine gunner is called Comrade Bren.) A handsome man dressed in shin-length shorts and orange flip-flops, Victor first apologizes for his poor English (he speaks it perfectly), then for our circuitous journey: a rebel operation had caused more "bad weather" to the south. "Our people were carrying out a punitive action," says Victor, meaning an assassination by an N.P.A. "sparrow unit" or death squad. The man killed was a farmer...
...About a fifth of N.P.A. fighters are under 18, according to Jane's Information Group, an authority on defense and terrorism. Most of this 30-strong platoon are too young to recall the purges and, despite embracing communal life, have often joined the rebels for personal, rather than political, reasons. Many are high-school dropouts with no job prospects, impressionable youths whom the N.P.A. recruits and molds into loyal killers for the communist cause. For Joven, 21, joining meant personal salvation. "I had a different lifestyle before," he says. "I was addicted to marijuana and alcohol. I hung out with...
...often lethargic standards of troops fighting long-running jungle wars, this N.P.A. platoon seems hyperactive. At 4 a.m., hours before daybreak, its soldiers are performing drills and martial arts in flip-flops and bare feet, then practicing grenade throwing with rocks from a nearby river. Their entire week is plotted out: from Monday to Friday, there's military and medical training, plus basic education and indoctrination sessions; weekends are devoted to food production and cultural activities. Even off duty, the platoon stays on message, gathering around a guitar to sing rebel songs or-possibly for the benefit of the platoon...
...There are no ranks in the N.P.A.," Victor tells me, "only responsibilities." But experience makes some comrades more equal than others. Platoon leader Jorex, 41, is a brooding giant with a bandolier of grenades strung across his chest. As a youth, he was recruited by a government militia to fight the N.P.A. but instead defected to the rebels...