Word: platoons
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...Quantico Marine Base began at 4:30 A.M. with the wailing of an electric gong supplemented by the ferocious yelling of a platoon sergeant about three inches from my ear. After a wake-up run through the dark streets of the base, we were herded back into the barracks...
Within minutes I was on my feet with my towel in one hand and soap in the other, standing at attention on the harshly cold tile floor. After several minutes of being told how pathetic we were, my platoon was hustled into the shower. We held our towels outstretched in one hand and walked under the screaming nozzles in formation, your typical 15-second military shower...
...rest of my time at Quantico went by in a similarly frantic fashion: marching, running, polishing, screaming answers to platoon sergeants...
...comaraderie in their ranks because they just might all die together in the defense of their nation. However, death by a sniper's bullet isn't something that I have on my mind when I attend lectures. Lecture halls aren't trenches and the professor isn't our platoon commander leading us in a campaign against subject material. I have yet to hear a Gov professor throw on a helmet and flak jacket screaming: "Watch it boys, they've lobbed over a copy of Locke's Two Treatises of Government! Get down! Aaaaargh...
Perhaps that mirror is blurred by tropical humidity and nostalgie de la boue. Whatever the reason, the French view of Southeast Asia is less wide- and wild-eyed than Oliver Stone's version in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The perspective in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover is as cloistered in its 1920s Saigon love nest as the French were from awareness of the impending revolution. Pierre Schoendoerffer's Dien Bien Phu (yet to open in the U.S.) meticulously restages the climactic French defeat as if it were all about artillery and not national destinies...