According to the Scholastic Encyclopedia of the United States at War, about 60,000 U.S troops died in the Vietnam war. Units are very important here. Troops are humans. Troops are family members. Most of us get shocked when we hear that a car is $60,000. That is beyond my comprehension. How can one dollar be more important to us than one soldier? Both, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, made me realize how war, to many people, defeats the meaning of what a person’s life is really worth.
There is a scene in Full Metal Jacket where a soldier is sitting on a helicopter, flying over Vietnamese farmlands. He is shooting at innocent civilians while laughing. His excuse for this is that any of them could be Vietcong. I do not believe that these soldiers actually believe that. None of them are serious about what they are doing. They have been trained to love to kill. This is evident when, in Platoon, in the middle of the village, the two lieutenants starts fighting, and the rest of the platoon begins to cheer them on. Mind you, this is in the midst of a huge war, in the middle of a village, in front of the same people that they despise. How can anyone believe that these soldiers took the war seriously?
Why should they take the war seriously? In Full Metal Jacket there is a scene where the soldiers are being interviewed. Half of them did not care why they were there, and the other half knew that they were not wanted in Vietnam. It makes one wonder how they could chuckle while killing someone after knowing that no one wants them there. They are ruining the lives of people, and not receiving gratitude instead. Why should they?
I noticed that racism did not seem to play a huge role in either movies. Sure, there were some racist remarks, but they were taken very lightly. There was no harm in them. That sure is an optimistic way to look at it. In the war zone, there is no racism.
Also, in both movies, I noticed that as close as these men were to death, many of them did not have a conscience. They found death to be a joke. They found torture to be a joke. I compare these people with criminals with life sentences in jails. They know they are in there for a very long time, but instead of getting worse and worse, they find God. It took me a while to come up with a hypothesis for this, and there is a possibility that what I am about to say is true.
Soldiers in war, especially in the Vietnam War, only see their day-to-day battles, and how they are taking them nowhere. They see no reason to be in this war. Why would they even think a God exists after seeing all those people die? How could they think a God exists and still kill all those people? Maybe my mind is too naïve to comprehend.
Criminals in jail know why they are there. They are there because of their own faults, unlike soldiers, who have done nothing wrong to deserve this. Maybe this is why the soldiers in the movies were raping the village women, and taunting the crippled with smiles on their faces.
Platoon was much more effective and convincing to me. The fight that the main character (Chris Taylor) was fighting with himself is enough to overpower Full Metal Jacket, which had a main character that did not show his emotion as well as Charlie Sheen did. Because of this, Platoon showed more of what the U.S. soldier really felt in the Vietnam War.
I want to end this blog by saying that I have never analyzed a movie while watching it as much as I did just now. I have, also, never enjoyed watching a movie as much as I just did. Maybe there really is something to the statement that analyzing a movie does not take away the entertainment in it, but instead adds to it.
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