Enemy foot soldiers eventually materialize out of the haze and a fire fight breaks out. There's never any evidence that the enemy suffered any casualties, but one of the sergeants in the Second Platoon tosses a grenade that kills one American and slightly wounds Taylor, sending him to sick bay for three days.
Taylor soon realizes that his platoon is divided into two groups: the juicers, who prefer drinking alcohol and listening to country music, and the heads, who prefer smoking dope and listening to rock. The juicers follow Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), a hardened combat veteran who has been wounded seven times. The heads follow Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), who is also a seasoned combat veteran, but Elias tries to maintain a sense of humanity about the war, whereas Barnes does not. Taylor quickly falls in with Elias' group, and there's a nice sequence where the heads get high and sing along with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles on "Tracks of My Tears."
One day Second Platoon stumbles onto a large enemy bunker complex which had obviously been vacated only minutes before their arrival. They soon become aware that a popular member of the platoon is missing, and later they discover his dead body tied to a tree, his throat cut. In an ugly mood, the platoon then enters a nearby village and finds weapons and food that could only have been stored there for enemy troops. The villagers are uncooperative, and Taylor becomes so incensed that he fires bullets near the foot of a one-legged civilian just to make him "dance." But a little later, Taylor regains control of his emotions and stops the rape of one of the village women by some of the other Americans.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Barnes becomes outraged with the yammering of an older woman and shoots her dead. Sergeant Elias witnesses the murder and is able to halt further violence against the villagers, but the simmering hostility between the two sergeants has now reached the boiling point: The deeply moral Elias will undoubtedly pursue having formal charges brought against Barnes, an outcome that Barnes will stop at nothing to prevent. That night as Taylor sits in the rain beside a bombed out jungle church, he says, "A civil war in the platoon. Half the men with Barnes, half with Elias. I can't believe we're fighting each other when we should be fighting them."
The film goes on to show some harrowing ground combat sequences, and during the fighting, the conflict between Barnes and Elias is brought to a satisfying resolution. Much of Second Platoon is wiped out in a battle against the 141st North Vietnam Army Regiment, but Taylor survives although he is wounded. Since this is Taylor's second time to be wounded, he is allowed to leave Vietnam. As he departs the battlefield on a helicopter, Taylor says, "I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy--we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there the rest of my days... But be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To teach to others what we know. And to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to life."
If anyone doubts that Stone intends for the tone of "Platoon" to be elegiac, all they need to do is watch the World War II-style end credits, where a succession of 16 brief scenes is reprised with each scene showing one member of the Second Platoon and giving the name of the character and the name of the actor who portrayed the character. But although the acting is generally fairly good in "Platoon," it isn't really an actor's film. Only one performance is truly memorable, namely that of Tom Berenger as the bellicose Sergeant Barnes.
What I like best about Platoon is the way the viewer is thrown into a series of chaotic situations with no clear indication as to what he or she is supposed to get out of it. The combat scenes are confusing, the enemy is elusive, and Second Platoon is seldom given a clear objective. Ordinary notions of morality are mostly inapplicable, and there are no easy answers as to how the soldiers should behave.
I see Platoon as a very personal statement by Oliver Stone about what the Vietnam War meant to him, and it seems likely that the war meant something quite different to lots of other Americans. Still, many of the demons that bedeviled Stone at the time he made "Platoon" trouble a substantial number of thoughtful Americans to this day, and through his film he was somehow able to shed light on the human condition. I think Platoon is a great movie, and I plan to watch it again many times over the years.
Note: Platoon DVD Release Date: June 5, 2001
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