Over the Rambo

Platoon

Written and directed by Oliver Stone

At the USA Paris

WRITER MICHAEL HERR finished up his psychedelic memoir of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, with an odd chant: "Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there." He was wrong. If it was anything like what is depicted in Oliver Stone's Platoon, we had no idea.

The 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 The last American troops were withdrawn in 1973, Saigon fell in 1975, and the public consciousness repressed it like some horrible trauma of childhood.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.

The collective reawakening of memory has had its perverse offshoots. One way of rationalizing a war we lost is to assume we should have won it, but the damned bureaucrats/politicians/military brass kept us from finishing it off. John Rambo, unhindered American fighting man, could have won it. If the bad guys had let him.

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.

The story is simple: a single infantry platoon operates near the Cambodian border in 1968. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), standing in for Stone, has dropped out of college and volunteered for the Nam, hoping to prove his manhood and his self-worth on the field of honor. The film opens with him joining the platoon clean cut and pale as linen. It ends with him being evacuated, turned black with blood and smoke. The movie is about his transition from one color to another.

There is only the vaguest idea of a military mission to accomplish: from the platoon's point of view, and ours, their only objective is to emerge from the jungle at the end of the day with arms and legs and life intact. Men die in brutal and unexpected ways, booby-trapped, shot from the treeline. The survivors of each attack shake with terror and rage. Their friends die at the hands of an invisible enemy who always seems to be a step ahead.

Protecting and leading the men of the platoon are the squad sergeants, who, under the obligatory incompetent lieutenant, control the lives and fates of the grunts. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is the idealist, trying to preserve some code of moral behavior at the end of the world. Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a creature of the war, a drawling, scarred, amoral survivor. Both are killers. The only difference is how they go about it. As Chris describes it in one of his voice-over "letter home," the two sergeants fight "for the possession of my soul."

The conflict plays itself out in typical movie fashion, with the villain triumphant and then paying the price. But by the end of the film it doesn't seem to matter. The platoon and its politics are the extent of the universe for these grunts, but amidst all the killing and terror and death, justice, poetic or not, has no meaning.

WE ALL 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.

There are no grand images, like the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. All we see of the jets flying over head, for example, are the faces of the grunts watching them. This approach forgoes any artistic epiphanies for a very real tension, felt in the gut: a genuine fear that something terrible is going to happen to the people on the screen and that there is nothing we can do about it. And when those people express the same fear, we begin to have an inkling of what it must have been like.

Platoon's audience, packing the large theater on a weeknight, still could not quite cope with what they saw. Some cried, some did not. "Nice shooting," laughed one man behind me as Barnes picked off a fleeing civilian. In another scene, Elias runs through the brush, singlehandedly ambushing an enemy squad. "Go, Rambo!" said someone. Eventually, everyone became very quiet.

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 in 1968.

Philip Caputo, author of A Rumour of War, commanded a platoon at Danang in 1965. He describes in his book how some of the veterans tried to describe to the inexperienced Marines what it was all about, and how the new recruits refused to listen. "They had already been where we were going, to that frontier between life and death, but none of us wanted to listen to them," Caputo writes. "So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its own war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own."