Platoon and FULL METAL JACKET!!!!!

Platoon seemed really gruesome to me. If that were really how the U.S. soldiers handled themselves during the Vietnam War I certainly can see that contributing to our defeat in the war. The movie just made me question the honesty and integrity of the soldiers out there fighting for our country. When I see corrupted leaders like that I always wonder if the leaders we have today are corrupted. I don’t really know why but this movie wasn’t all that interesting to me. The only exciting parts were the battles, I didn’t even hear about any of the names of the battles that they were in. I also disliked the organization of the movie because in the beginning it had the subtitle that said that the location was being filmed “Somewhere near the Cambodian border,” but later on in the movie, the soldiers said something close to, “Man we’re in Cambodia now?!” I just didn’t get how the soldiers didn’t know that they were going to end up in Cambodia although they were right at the border of it if they didn’t already know to begin with. In Full Metal Jacket, I didn’t like how one third of the movie showed how the soldiers were being trained to fight the war. In my opinion, I believe most of a soldier’s mental illness or distortion comes from being in the actual war, not during the process of training to become a soldier to fight in the war. That didn’t make sense to me when I finished watching the movie. I did like how the main character eventually was involved in the war because then it wouldn’t have been weird for him to train in the first one-third of the movie and not use any of his knowledge in training out in the battlefield. I preferred Full Metal Jacket over Platoon, just because of the fact that Full Metal Jacket mentioned important events while as in Platoon, I didn't know what was going on. Platoon could've been a movie about a different war story if they didn't mention Cambodia and Vietnam in the movie because there were no important events mentioned.
I believe the directors were just trying to give the audience a sense of what the war was like in the mind of an actual soldier out in the battle field. The main character went through environmental attacks from leeches, ants, snakes which I strongly believe that’s what the soldiers in the real Vietnam War had to go through. This took us through more of the war than Full Metal Jacket because Full Metal Jacket had the main character that witnessed what his friends went through throughout the training process to become a soldier and also during the war. I think the similarity in the two movies are how they try to portray what a soldier goes through during a war, whether he’s actually out in the battlefield or a soldier that’s just a journalist and writes about what’s going on. Another similarity is the fact that there was some sort of corruption within the military/soldiers because in both movies, one soldier fired at another person that was on the same side. In Full Metal Jacket, the mentally ill soldier shot at his general and in Platoon, one of the generals shot the other general while out in the battlefield. There are plenty of differences between the two movies as well. In Full Metal Jacket, there were at least a few key battles mentioned, such as the Tet Offensive, whereas Platoon didn’t mention any of the key battles of the war. Another difference is in the fact that the main characters in both movies were different, because in Platoon, the main character was actually out in the battle field shooting at enemies while the main character’s role in Full Metal Jacket was just to primarily write about what was going on in the war while he’s out rarely on the battlefield.