Viet-God-Damn-nam

As we all know the Vietnam War was one of the greatest military failures in United States history. We went blindly into a country with our big bad America image thinking we would help to liberate a country from the evils of communism! Well guess again America. It turns out we were wrong, so very, very wrong. The war went on for a decade killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians and United States Soldiers only for us to leave the country with our tail in between are legs. It was a smack in the face to our country and our military.

With the negative opinion for the War in Vietnam we of course have American propaganda to bolster support for a war the majority of American's disagreed with.  In Lawrence Lichty and Raymond Carroll's essay Fragments of War: Oliver Stone's Platoon they discuss the films of John Wayne's The Green Berets and The Boys in C Company as being two such films to come out about the Vietnam war that tried to show the lighter side to the war, by adding their own spins on it. Lichty and Raymond describe these films as, "Many Hollywood combat films begin with the training of a single unit and follow it into battle. American troops are depicted as heroic; the enemy fanatical. Our men are portrayed as reluctant soldiers more interested in the girl back home, their families, and baseball than they are in international politics." These same tropes can be seen in both the films mentioned in the article, especially the John Wayne film, and this was not what the American public wanted to see which is why they were given such bad reviews.

No one wanted to see s sugar coated film about Vietnam, especially when the war was still going on and you could see more horrific events on the nightly news then on the silver screen. This is why Oliver Stone's Platoon was such a refreshing change of pace for those who lived through and experienced the Vietnam. Stone was in the Vietnam war, he experienced what this war was really like and you can see that in his film. In Platoon there are still the same tropes as the cookie cutter films before it, like the girl back home, but those tropes are crushed when they fat Pvt. who talked about his girl back home died in the next fire fight. The men in Elias' group of men are shown smoking marijuana to escape the real hell they were living in. Soldiers are raping, pillaging, and murdering innocent civilians. There's soldiers cutting ears off for trophies, men wounding themselves to get a free ride home, and even instances of soldiers hiding instead of fighting to survive in a war that everyone thought was pointless.

This WAS Vietnam told through the eyes of someone who was actually there. Oliver Stone saw these events in real life and he showed the world through his film to tell the tale of what these men went through. The men that America deemed unwantable, worthless, or criminals. These men fought for something they didn't believe in, but what the American government told them to believe in. Platoon is real Vietnam and it is why it kicked the ass of all other Vietnam films before. This was the real story, not a John Wayne embellished piece of American propaganda.