Word: nam
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...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...
...boot camp of hell, and a sensitive man could die from it. "You don't belong in the Nam, man," a warwise soldier tells Chris (Charlie Sheen), who stands in for Stone as the narrator of Platoon. "This ain't your place at all." It is, though, and that is the rite-of-passage tragedy the film describes. For Chris is torn between the conflicting charismata of two sergeants: Elias (Willem Dafoe), a natural jungle fighter, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), a pure-blooded killer. Both men have a nice sense of their power?over themselves, their men and the enemy...
...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...
Perot soon started trying to make big things happen. In 1969 he hired two Boeing 707s to carry Christmas gifts to American prisoners of war in North Viet Nam. The Communists did not cooperate, but Perot's reputation as a quixotic adventurer was born. The same year, he sent 152 spouses and children of missing servicemen to the Paris peace talks in a failed bid to parley with North Vietnamese negotiators. Starting in 1971, Perot launched a rescue bid on Wall Street by buying two failing brokerages and sinking $100 million into their revival. That effort failed in 1974. Perot...
This loss of faith in the President is perhaps the most significant?as well as disturbing?result of the current White House crisis. Over the past two decades Viet Nam and Watergate seriously diminished the presidency. For many Americans, Ronald Reagan, with his can-do optimism, returned some of the old luster to the office. Much of that has faded in the past month. "One of the hallmarks of the Reagan presidency has been his ability to restore the public's confidence in the White House as an institution and in Government's ability to perform," says a Republican political...