I didn't really want to see Platoon. The Washington Post's Henry Allen, himself a Marine Corps Vietnam vet, expressed my sentiments exactly in a January 1987 column. People kept pushing Vietnam war movies on him and asking "How isn't it like Vietnam?"
"I'd try to explain," he wrote, "that it was just a movie, it was colored light moving around on a screen...." But there were those who wanted it to be reality, who "wanted me to tell them that art's truths were The Truth, The Word, the war itself." And for some, Platoon fit that bill. "A young man who was in grade school when I was in Vietnam tells me it's 'authentic,'" Allen wrote. "Time magazine published a cover story about it and the headline said: 'Vietnam as It Really Was.'"
"This is silly and decadent," he concluded, "this willful confusion of life and art. And it's dangerous. War is too wildly stupid, glorious, hideous, huge, and human for us to think that art can tell us what it really is."
And the fact that Platoon was nominated for eight Academy Awards certainly was no encouragement to see the movie. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lost me years ago when they gave an Oscar to Hearts and Minds, an ostensible "documentary" on the Vietnam War that was so deliberately biased, so viciously anti-American, that it would have made even Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl blush in shame at the depths to which her "art" had descended.
And finally there's the matter of Platoon's writer-director Oliver Stone. The impulse for an ad hominem attack is almost irresistible, especially since in his public statements Stone has provided more than enough ammunition. And in those statements he's not above such lapses in logic himself. For instance, he told Time magazine that he wanted to show that Chris Taylor, Platoon's protagonist, "came out of the war stained and soiled - all of us, every vet. I want vets to face up to it and be proud they came back. So what if there's some bad in us? That's the price you pay. Chris pays a big price. He becomes a murderer."
The handful of bearded, wild-eyed professional Vietnam vets still in their camouflage fatigues two decades after the war no doubt loved those words, for they provided yet another ploy with which to milk public sympathy. But for most Vietnam vets those words were pure and unadulterated balderdash. Poll after poll has shown that the overwhelming majority of those 2,594,000 Americans who served in Vietnam were proud of their service, and were neither stained nor soiled by the experience. "Speak for yourself, Oliver," most would say. "But you sure as hell don't speak for 'all of us, every vet.'"
Down for the Count
So before I even entered the theater, Platoon was almost down for the count. I was fully prepared for another Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now - another "big picture" of the Vietnam War. ("It was significant," Evelyn Waugh wrote in Officers and Gentlemen, "that [the] metaphoric use of 'picture' [as in 'The Big Picture'] had come into vogue at the time when all the painters in the world had finally abandoned lucidity.")
Having heard and read about the movie, and with Stone's professed anti-American biases in
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