Word: vietnamize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Journalist Phillip Knightley prefers his legends lightly tarnished. An earlier book, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, removed the romantic luster from combat journalism. The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century is a pickling look at the romantic past and bureaucratic present of the flourishing espionage business...
...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 The last American troops were withdrawn in 1973, Saigon fell in 1975, and the public consciousness repressed it like some horrible trauma of childhood.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...
...KNOW what Vietnam, the first televised war, looked like; and obviously Stone's designers went to great pains to accurately recreate the environment, from the weapons to the hash dens. But the concern here is not to show what it looked like, but how it felt...
Oliver Stone's previous film was Salvador, an indictment of American involvement in Central America, made with equal skill. It failed at the box office: no one wanted to view our current indiscretions. Although we have come a long way in our intellectual understanding of what happened in Vietnam, there is still a failure to connect the past and the present. Safely enrobed in history, Vietnam cannot hurt us now. Platoon helps to bring it back to the present, to make it real for people who were infants...