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...Platoon. In the far-right Washington Times' Insight magazine, John Podhoretz castigates it as "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." The film, he says, "blackens the name and belittles the sacrifice of every man and woman who served the United States in the Viet Nam War (including Stone)." Politicians are eager to return the salvos. Former Senator Gary Hart, aware of the electorate's fondness for presidential candidates with movie credentials, campaigns for the film by urging that "every teenager in America should see Platoon...
...been there: David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times and, in The Best and the Brightest, documented two Administrations' slides into the Big Muddy. "Platoon is the first real Viet Nam film," Halberstam proclaims, "and one of the great war movies of all time. The other Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and politically accurate. It understands something that the architects of the war never did: how the foliage, the thickness of the jungle, negated U.S. technological superiority. You can see how the forest sucks in American soldiers...
Neither Sly Stallone nor Oliver Stone can put the whole picture of Viet Nam on a movie screen. There were 2.7 million stories in the naked jungle. Each veteran has his own view of the war, and each will have his own vision of Platoon. More than a few are disturbed by its presentation of a military unit at war with itself. Says Bob Duncan, 39, who served in the 1st Infantry at the same time Stone was in the 25th: "He managed to take every cliche -- the 'baby killer' and 'dope addict' -- that we've lived with...
Other vets deny the prevalence of dope smoking and the depiction of military officers as either psychos or cowards. But John Wheeler, 42, a veteran who is president of the Center for the Study of the Viet Nam Generation in Washington and chairman of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund, argues that "there were drug cultures; there were green lieutenants. Stone / wanted to clean out the festering part of the wound. The next Viet Nam movie may be the one that tells the whole truth: that we were the best-equipped, best-trained army ever fielded, but against a dedicated...
...inhuman futility. Graybeards on the right may call it a tribute to our fighting men, in whatever foreign adventure. The intelligentsia can credit Platoon with expressing, in bold cinematic strokes, Stone's grand themes of comradeship and betrayal. And the average youthful moviegoer -- too young to remember Viet Nam even as the living-room war -- may discover where Dad went in the 1960s and why he came home changed or came home in a body...