The Vietnam Reader (61 page)

The storyline of
Platoon
is standard fare. Like many of the oral histories,
Platoon
seems to follow the arc of the
Bildungsroman.
A quote from Ecclesiastes precedes the film—“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth”—immediately followed by the perfectly green Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) arriving on an airport tarmac in Vietnam only to face a trolley of carts hauling body bags and a line of jive-talking short-timers, one with the thousand-yard stare. Like Willard in
Apocalypse Now
(played by Charlie’s father, Martin Sheen), Chris tells us his tale in a portentous voice-over, supposedly a letter or series of letters to his grandmother, though this device fades away later, when he tells the audience things his character would never tell his grandma.

We go out on patrol for the first time with Chris, and Stone pours on the realistic details for which the film is known: the jungle, the bugs, the equipment, the lingo, the heat. The focus, as in the oral histories and realistic novels, is on the grunt’s daily existence, the everyday life. Suddenly the other greenie who came on board with Chris is killed in an ambush, and quickly we meet the power structure of the platoon: Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), a macho professional soldier whose face is grotesquely scarred; his counterpart Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), who helps Chris lug his extra gear; and the useless ROTC lieutenant who wants to give the orders but doesn’t know what to do. No one mourns the dead new guy, they just look at him with disgust. “Man’d be alive if he had a few more days to learn something,” Barnes says, pointing up the
Bildungsroman
theme.

“I think I made a big mistake coming here,” Chris tells us.

We stand down, head back to the firebase, where Chris shares his personal history with his buddies. Stone’s screenplay touches on racial and social inequality here, as well as piling on more sharply drawn details. “You volunteered for this shit?” one guy asks. “You got to be rich in the first place to think like that.”

It seems the platoon is split into two groups, the heads and the
juicers. Chris finds the heads getting stoned in a bunker (to the Jefferson Airplane’s totally overused “White Rabbit”), and Elias, bare-chested and in a hammock, beckons him. “First time?” Elias asks, and then gives him a true shotgun, blowing the smoke down a gun barrel. “Put your mouth on this,” Elias says, and Chris does. Cut to Kevin Dillon’s character, Bunny, sitting in front of a Confederate flag, swigging a beer and talking garbage with Junior and Rodriguez. Bunny tosses around ethnic slurs and seems stupid and out of touch. Back in the bunker, the heads are slow-dancing with each other.

The platoon goes out and finds a tunnel complex. A booby trap kills a man, and later, in the confusion, another member of the platoon, Manny, turns up missing. They find him dead and staked to a tree, tortured. Barnes is pissed and leads the platoon into the nearest village, where the troops unleash their frustration on civilians. Swept up in the hatred, Chris makes a one-legged man dance, firing at the ground. Right in front of him, Bunny kills a retarded boy with his rifle butt. “Holy shit,” he marvels, “you see that fucking head come apart?” This sobers Chris, and soon Elias shows up to put a stop to the slaughter, facing off with Barnes.

The LT comes up and says the captain wants the place torched, and so the village burns to Samuel Barber’s syrupy Adagio. Chris regains his humanity, stopping a gang rape, saying, “She’s a fucking human being, man!”

Back at base, Elias reports the incident, but though the captain says there’ll be a court-martial if there were any “illegal killings,” nothing immediate comes of it.

Chris and Elias talk that night. “There’s no right or wrong in them,” Elias says of the stars.

“Do you believe?” Chris asks him, about the American involvement.

“In ’65, yeah. Now, no. We’re going to lose this war. We’ve been kicking people’s asses so long, I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.”

Chris ruminates on the split in the platoon. “I can’t believe we’re fighting each other when we should be fighting them.”

Back in the jungle, the platoon runs into some serious VC. They’re in danger of being overrun when Elias volunteers to outflank the
enemy. The LT botches his grid coordinates and short rounds fall all around them. They’ve got to pull back, get the hell out. But Elias is still out there. Barnes says he’ll go get him. Instead, when he finds him, Barnes levels his weapon and pumps some rounds into him.

Barnes runs into Chris, who asks him where Elias is. Barnes says he’s dead, and they hop into the Hueys and get out of there just as the VC come streaming out of the jungle, Elias a few steps ahead of them, bleeding, stumbling, raising his arms toward the departing lift-ships. He dies in slow motion with Barber’s Adagio going, his arms out, Christlike.

Chris knows Barnes killed him. “When you know, you know,” he explains.

Barnes hears his explanation down in the heads’ bunker and challenges Chris to do something about it. Barnes sneers at the joint they’re sharing. “You smoke this shit to escape from reality? Me, I don’t need this shit. I
am
reality.” Barnes taunts Chris until Chris attacks him, but Barnes is too strong. Barnes marks his cheek with a knife and walks off.

They’re about to be sent back into the jungle. “It felt like we were returning to the scene of the crime,” Chris says. Rumor is they’re going to see action. Big Harold (Forrest Whitaker) says, “Somewhere out there’s the beast, and he’s hungry tonight.” Getting ready, Bunny says of the village killings, “I don’t feel like we done something wrong, but sometimes I get this bad feeling,” then invokes the World War II hero Audie Murphy.

That night, they’re overrun by the VC, and Stone administers poetic justice, killing Bunny in an over-the-top scene. In the middle of the confusion, Barnes and Chris square off. Barnes is about to kill Chris (his face strikingly like Willard’s here) when an airstrike hits and we’re blinded by white light.

Chris wakes to a red deer. Barnes is trying to crawl away. “Get me a medic,” he says. “Go on, boy.” Then when he realizes that Chris means to kill him, Barnes chides him: “Do it.”

Chris does.

In the end, good wins out over evil. The stoner dudes live, and Barnes’s right-hand man O’Neill gets stuck with the crappy task of
leading second platoon. As the medevac lifts off, taking Chris away, Rhah, one of the heads, bangs his chest and lifts his arms in triumph, an echo of Elias’s last gesture.

Chris flies off, profile framed in the door of the chopper (again the Adagio), the green mountains of Vietnam (the Philippines) sliding by behind him. “I think now, looking back,” he concludes, “we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves, and the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there the rest of my days, as I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called the possession of my soul. There are times since I’ve felt like a child born of those two fathers.” Lastly, Chris cites for all veterans “an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.”

The film ends with a placard: “Dedicated to the men who fought and died in the Vietnam War.”

With that wrap-up of a speech, it seems
Platoon
can be read as a
Bildungsroman,
as Chris moves from innocence to experience and can make a meaningful lesson of his service that he can use and pass along to others. He’s no longer the young man in Ecclesiastes, and while there may be little reason to rejoice, he’s survived his trial. He’s learned.

Oliver Stone struggled for years to get the backing to make
Platoon,
so it would be wrong to call it an instant success, but upon release the film garnered solid box-office receipts and sterling reviews, becoming something of a phenomenon. It was talked about, lauded, debated.
Time
magazine dedicated seven pages to it. Most critics noted the level of detail as well as the response of many veterans, who thought it the first film that showed what Vietnam was really like. In 1986,
Platoon
was sold and accepted as realism, perhaps even history. Stone had done the impossible, critics said, and the academy agreed.
Platoon
won the Oscar for best picture, and Stone won for best director.

Now, a decade later, it’s hard not to see
Platoon—
despite its attention to concrete detail—as an allegory for American society during the war. Chris is given the choice of backing the heads (the antiwar counterculture) or the juicers (the establishment), which, in Stone’s view
of America, is an easy choice. And the day-to-day moral dilemmas of the American soldier in Vietnam—the grunt’s inner life—aren’t gone into in any real depth, only sideswiped during big, melodramatic scenes, most of which are, and were at the time, familiar clichés in the literature. The first dead, the U.S. atrocity in the village, the incompetent ROTC LT, Bunny the psycho—all of these would have been old hat to anyone who’d read the novels or the oral histories. But astonishing as this may seem, in 1986, thirteen years after the last U.S. ground troops left Vietnam, the American moviegoer had never seen any of them.

The major films that preceded
Platoon
focused not on combat but the effect of the war on America—the war as a way of understanding America.
Platoon
does this as well, but merely as subtext. On the surface, it deals with combat and the tensions and camaraderie between soldiers, and though it awkwardly twists its plot and characters to set up almost cartoonish good-versus-evil climaxes, it succeeds around the edges, nails the atmosphere, takes us there. In a sense, all the smaller elements of the movie work, while the major pieces fail. What, finally, does
Platoon
tell us that we don’t already know? And yet, this is it, this is
the
Vietnam movie. It captured the attention of the nation as no other version of Vietnam has or possibly ever will.

There’s no certain answer as to why this happened. By 1986, as evidenced by the
Rambo
and Missing in Action films, America was ready to see the Vietnam vet as a hero, and this applied retroactively to the vet as soldier in Vietnam.
Platoon
gave America back the vet as innocent, the vet capable of seeing clearly and making the right choices. Chris Taylor (Christ?) is seen, as the eighties demanded, as a victim of the war, a survivor, and it’s his experience that’s held up as representative, not, as Chris implies at the end, a mix of Barnes’s and Elias’s. Chris isn’t a professional soldier or a frontier hero type; he’s an average middle-class kid, yet he volunteered, hoping “to see something I haven’t seen, learn something I don’t know yet.” It could be said that he’s an everyman, a regular guy yet not a reluctant draftee. There’s something of the adventurer in him, or the quest hero, which he fulfills by killing the clearly evil figure of Barnes. As in
Apocalypse Now
, the war itself is assumed to be absurd and unwinnable, but the
inner struggle for the soul of America doesn’t end in an ambiguous tie, as it does with Willard slaying Kurtz and becoming one with the face of the stone Buddha, but in a clear victory for Good, with Chris surviving to bring his message home and teach it to others. For a supposedly gritty, realistic film about the American war in Vietnam,
Platoon
has the form of a melodrama and what could be seen—in a historical context—as an incredibly happy ending.

Just as
The Deer Hunter
beat
Apocalypse Now
into theaters,
Platoon
upstaged Stanley Kubrick’s long-awaited
Full Metal Jacket
(1987). Kubrick’s previous epics, such as
Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange,
and
2001,
had established him as one of the finest filmmakers in the world, one with a keen—even cutting—political and cultural sensibility. When early word leaked that he was training his eye on Vietnam, critics wondered if he would be the one to finally “get the war right.” Kubrick had enlisted Gustav Hasford and Michael Herr to help him adapt Hasford’s
The Short-Timers
to the screen. The talent, it seemed, was in place, and hopes for the film were high; it had been seven years since Kubrick’s last release,
The Shining,
and that movie, though obviously brilliant in parts, had been widely met with disappointment. This would be Kubrick’s return to form. And so, like
Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket
steamed into theaters both too late and burdened with impossible critical expectations.

The movie opens with recruits being shorn of their locks to a country-western tune, “Good-bye My Darling, Hello Vietnam,” and soon it’s apparent that we’re going to spend a good deal of time (half the film, in fact) going through basic training with this group of Marines. In the barracks, drill instructor Gunny Hartman (Lee Ermey, a real-life DI before taking up acting) berates his charges in an extended and hilarious routine, giving our major players their new names—Joker (Matthew Modine), Cowboy (Arliss Howard), and Gomer Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio)—and laying out his philosophy of the Corps. His harangue is full of lines like, “Only steers and queers come from Texas. Do you suck dicks? You look like you could suck a golfball through a garden hose. You look like the kind of person who would fuck someone in the ass and not give him the courtesy of a reach-around.”
He leads his men through PT (physical training), calling obscene cadences and intimidating the fat, hapless Pyle. He instructs the recruits to give their rifle a girl’s name and to sleep with it. “No more finger banging Mary Jane Rottencrotch,” this is the only pussy they’re going to get. In making these boys into men, Hartman stresses the immortality of the Corps, saying “God’s got a hard-on for Marines,” and in one brutal sequence, he strikes Joker for saying he doesn’t love the Virgin Mary. Impressed by Joker’s courage in standing up to him, Hartman makes him squad leader.

The training continues, as Joker narrates the change in the men in a flat voice-over. Pyle can’t hack it, and Hartman puts Joker in charge of shaping him up. It’s no use. Again and again, we see Pyle lagging behind the group, his trousers around his ankles and his thumb in his mouth. When he talks with Joker, it seems he’s reverting to childhood; he can’t button his shirt, he doesn’t know left from right. On the rifle range, Hartman tells them that a Marine needs a hard heart to kill, and later, after Pyle screws up and Hartman punishes the squad for it, Joker becomes at first a reluctant and then a vicious participant in a blanket party as the whole squad beats the sleeping Pyle. In the darkened barracks, Pyle cries like a baby, and Joker plugs his ears with his fingers.