Reframe: Platoon

My dad and I didn’t have much in common. My dad was good with his hands; I need help screwing in a light bulb. I got a college degree; my dad got a high school diploma. He loved to hunt, and the one time I went with him, I shot over a buck’s head to make the poor beast run away. My dad was a good shot, and I catch flies in tissue paper and release them outside.

To my dad, a good movie was anything that had Clint Eastwood or John Wayne in a wide-brimmed hat and atop a trusty steed. And hey, I like some of those films too, but my dad couldn’t tell one from the other. No matter how many times he watched The Outlaw Josey Wales or True Grit, he never knew or cared which one was which.

For me, and at an early age—raised on the cinematic insights of Siskel & Ebert—films were individual works of art. Many nights my dad would drop into my bedroom, watch 3-4 minutes of whatever arty film I was viewing, shake his head and before he left say, “I can’t make head nor tails of it!” 

Perhaps the most significant difference between my dad and I was that my dad went to war. As for me, I’ve been in two fist fights my whole life—and not one as an adult. 

When Oliver Stone’s Platoon was released in the winter of 1986, it was hardly the first significant or well-regarded movie about the Vietnam War. Hal Ashby’s terrific Coming Home (1978), Michael Cimino’s visceral The Deer Hunter (also 1978), and of course Francis Ford Coppola’s epic fever dream Apocalypse Now (1979) were all well-reviewed, well-seen, and well-represented at the Oscars. 

But in the seven years between Apocalypse Now and Platoon, Vietnam became the war that no one wanted to remember. It was the war the United States lost—the one from which returning soldiers were not welcomed home as heroes. They were men you might see in a bar still wearing their combat jackets, and as a nation, they were who we would look away from. 

Oliver Stone created a film that forced us to look. Hell, it’s less a film than it is a reckoning—one long in coming that didn’t take interest in the after effects of going to war (like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter), or take literary flights of fancy (as Apocalypse Now did, by incorporating Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” into the screenplay). Stone’s film was about being on the ground, “in the bush,” or “in the shit” as many Vietnam veterans would say. 

Coppola once stated that Apocalypse Now “is Vietnam.” As powerful as Coppola’s film remains to this day, it is Stone’s Platoon that feels more like a “you are here” experience. Platoon is about the grunts—the young men who were called to war and lacked the connections or the educational opportunities that would allow them to opt-out or defer from going to war. 

As Charlie Sheen’s Chris Taylor states in the film, these small town men are “…the bottom of the barrel, and they know it.” Stone knew from whence Taylor spoke, because Taylor is essentially Stone—a naive young man who quit college and volunteered for the war only to find himself lost in a jungle full of meaningless violence, initiated by a government that took young men of no means (and disproportionately of color) and threw them into a horror that none of them could have ever imagined. 

Stone positions Taylor between two sergeants, one (Willem Dafoe as Elias) a figurative angel, and the other (a jigsaw-faced Tom Berenger as Barnes) who you can almost believe is the devil. As Taylor tries to find his way through the madness of war, he is also caught in a battle between the two sergeants and their opposing philosophies and the cost of this battle, intentional or not, is nothing less than Taylor’s soul. 

One could argue (and many have) that Dafoe’s Elias is a Christ-like figure—Barnes even refers to him as a “water-walker” at one point—and that the death of Elias (set famously to Samuel Barber’s  “Adagio for Strings”) is a necessary sacrifice to show Taylor the depths of evil that men are capable of. As Elias’s arms reach to the sky, in this land that god has clearly forsaken, and bullets from the Viet Cong riddle his back, he strikes a pose not dissimilar to that of the crucifixion. 

Of course, what I just described is a tragic and poetic sequence from a film that knew it had to earn that moment by showing you the leeches and the ants on the necks of soldiers, the relentless heat that beats down upon them only to be followed by torrential rain—not to mention their enemy combatants who could be hiding around the bend of any tree or behind any bush. While Stone is careful to never show you Vietnamese soldiers from any viewpoint other than what an American GI would see them as—the enemy, he strongly humanizes the Vietnamese people by staging a version of the real-life infamous My Lai Massacre, which involved American troops murdering innocent civilians and burning their village to the ground. 

There may be no more horrific sight in the film than when the platoon, seeking revenge for the death of one of their own, raids a village and Taylor (at his very worst) makes a one-legged young man hop while he shoots at his foot shouting “Dance!” But Taylor’s momentary loss of his humanity is more than overshadowed by Kevin Dillon’s vile, and likely psychotic, “Bunny,” who bashes that same young man’s head in with the butt of his rifle, taking delight in how his brains are separated from his skull. War makes you an animal Stone seems to be saying, and the preserving of one’s humanity is perhaps the greatest battle of all. Taylor is willing to fight that battle. Bunny doesn’t seem to be aware of any conflict. 

To prepare his remarkable and eclectic cast (which includes Keith David, Johnny Depp, Corey Glover, Forest Whitaker, Tony Todd, Richard Edson, and John C. McGinley) Stone subjected the actors to a torturous boot camp that must have thinned the actors down to the gristle and allowed them to simply be in this film as opposed to act in any conventional sense.

After the death of Elias, Barnes addresses a small group of the Platoon about reality. He stands before them, his arms extend from his sides and he says, “I am reality.” In that bone-chilling moment you understand that as awful as Barnes is, in the space of war, he is not wrong. The hellish Barnes is indeed reality. The final battle scene of the film (which takes place at night and is incredibly and appropriately disorienting) certainly makes the case that we are watching the combatants engage at Hades’ gate. War is just hell on earth. 

Now, you may be wondering how I, who have never been to war, can be so certain of that declaration. Well, that’s where my dad comes in. My dad, a Vietnam veteran who saw the worst that humanity has to offer, took me to see Platoon with him. He wasn’t at all a moviegoer, but I think he wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe he also wanted to let his son know whether the film was an authentic depiction of his experience or not—I don’t know. But as the screen faded to black and the credits began to roll, he turned to me and said the only four words he would ever speak about Platoon:

“That’s how it was.”

And looking into my dad’s eyes, by god, I believed him.

For my dad, Sgt. Edward R. Toll, US Marine Corps, recipient of a bronze star and two Purple Hearts for his service in Vietnam. 

Born October 13, 1945  

Died September 17, 2023