Word: viet
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...killing spree had only begun. After belting down three vodkas, Delgado, a Colombian electronics engineer and a Viet Nam veteran, opened fire again, indiscriminately spraying the restaurant and its patrons with gunfire before police finally arrived and shot him dead. At week's end, the motive behind the massacre remained unclear. The final toll: 27 dead and ten wounded...
...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 to be so white-hot they will cauterize and heal the wounds of war, and singe everyone's soul in the process. Well, not quite, but Platoon is still the most impressive movie to deal with the fighting...
...Stone, a Yale dropout who had taught school in Saigon, volunteered for the infantry in Viet Nam. Suddenly the preppie was surrounded by guys he never would have met back in the "world." Urban blacks were importing tactics of street survival to the jungle; Southern farm boys were digging foxholes that might be their graves. You established camaraderie with your sergeant by taking a whiff of marijuana that he'd blow through a rifle barrel. And too soon you were inside the madness of frontline patrols, a captive of the heat, the exhaustion, the insects, the hatred of men whose...
...early-morning makeup call. Then two things happen: the actors stop attitudinizing and fall smartly into their roles, and the rivalry between Barnes and Elias begins to suppurate sensationally. Elias, a night-world Natty Bumppo, believes only in his skills and his men; he is both in Viet Nam and above it. Barnes can act as impromptu medic to save a soldier's life or, with equal vigor, kill a village woman in front of her husband. In him the grunts find everything worth admiring and hating about war. And even a man determined to kill the sergeant must wait...
...That comparison obviously looks plain silly, now, so instead we are left with Vietnam - albeit different interpretations of Vietnam. As Professor Juan Cole points out, Bush is probably relying on a hawkish view that while the Tet Offensive was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong, the spike of violence it brought may have struck a crippling political blow at the American public's will to fight the war. As Cole notes, the irony is that the upside of Tet may not be the first thing that comes to mind for Americans when their President compares Iraq to Vietnam...