War is hell, what the hell

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"Platoon's" immediate impact is powerful. Hollywood is here at its technical best showing how war is hell. Seen from the point of view of the foot soldier, details are so graphic that an audience's critical faculties are almost overwhelmed.

But after leaving the theater, I began to wonder why the producers had consciously highlighted the ambiguities of the Vietnam combat soldier's experience.

The "grunt" didn't know exactly what he was fighting for, yet his buddies were dying all around him. Most importantly, in order to survive he had to become inhuman. It is this last idea, how war turns young men into beasts, that the movies "Apocalypse Now" and "The Deer Hunter" used to justify the atrocities committed by Americans against the Vietnamese.

In "The Deer Hunter" there was a scene of the Viet Cong torturing American soldiers with a game of Russian Roulette. In "Platoon" the Americans find their slain point man tied to a stake. Immediately afterwards they go into a village and murder several villagers.

This village scene, although undeniably powerful, reveals the movie's standpoint. There are indeed weapons hidden in the village—although the villagers say they were forced to store them. Some of the villagers may be Viet Cong-—who knows? The Americans are under terrific pressure, thus perhaps not fully responsible for what they do. Only a few of the soldiers commit "atrocities"-some oppose the murders, some stand by and watch.

So, the film is telling us, this is how it really was-from the point of view of the grunt. The Vietnam War, including episodes like My Lai, was confused, ambiguous, horrible. There was no solution except to fight or die or, hopefully, get home.

This confusion is underlined throughout. Even the hero's, Taylor's, murder of the "bad" Sergeant Barnes is ambiguous. Is the shooting retribution for Barnes' murders, or a symbolic rejection of the war, or has Taylor become just as bestial as the sergeant, and this is merely an act of personal revenge?

At the end the hero makes a vague statement about Americans being their own enemy, and about how the two sergeants who represented opposing views will go on contending within his own soul. In other words, according to this movie, there is no definite right and wrong about the Vietnam "Platoon" is being touted as the answer to "Rambo," as a film which deals truthfully with Vietnam. It isn't, and it doesn't. Not quite.

Indeed, in the climactic scene Taylor even performs Rambo-type heroics, singlehandedly killing scores of "gooks." No doubt the movie's defenders will say it is only realism to portray the individual combat soldier's lack of answers. To be sure.

Or...was it a sophisticated cop-out to so restrict the point of view? After all, we have had Jon Voigt's speech at the high school in "Coming Home." The Vietnam War was wrong, Voigt's character said. America was morally wrong. In "Platoon" there is only the briefest expression of doubt.

The truth about Vietnam is not ambiguous and confused. The way to clear up the bad aftertaste of that war is not to try to justify our country's criminal aggression, but to make reparations to the victims of the aggression—the Vietnamese people and the American veterans who were cynically used.

But most importantly, if we won't face the truth about the past, we condemn ourselves in the future. In this respect "Platoon" fails us. experiences graphically illustrate the frustration and violence inherent in a war that was fought against the Vietnamese people-a people who were fighting for their national liberation.

The omnipresent fear-and effect-of ambushes and booby traps, and the thirst for revenge engendered by the deaths of their buddies, leads the platoon-and the audience—to the most gut-wrenching and emotionally charged scene in the film.

After a couple of the GIs are maimed and killed by a booby trap at a stumbled-upon North Vietnamese Army (NVA) base camp in the jungle, the platoon finds the trussedup body of one of their members outside a village they've been ordered to "check-out."

This episode sets the scene for a series of atrocities that the GIs commit against the helpless villagers. Only the intervention of the "good" sergeant prevents the platoon from wiping out the whole village.

For those who don't know, such atrocities were an everyday occurrence in Vietnam.

Director Oliver Stone-to his credit—involves the audience (makes them complicit) in this scene. The Vietnamese villagers see some of their loved ones murdered. Their village is completely burned down by working-class youth who have been turned into animals and are following orders passed down from above. ('Don't you know rich people have been -San Francisco: -ist Action., Feb. 20, 8 p.m.

Address: 3435 Army

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