I had posted previously that Full Metal Jacket was more a commentary on the psychological/emotional context of Vietnam. A particular scene in Platoon makes that theory fall on its face. The scene I'm talking about is the interaction between Chris (Charlie Sheen) and a one-legged Vietnamese man. To me, this scenes dialogue epitomizes the interaction between United States soldiers and Vietnamese peasants.
When raiding a small Vietnamese village, Chris finds an amputee hiding in a hut. Chris, already agitated, begins to yell at the man to "get out there". Big Howard asks Chris to "be cool" because "they [the man and his mother] are scared"."They're scared huh?" Chris replies. "What about me man?" Chris' words summarize the thoughts that thousands upon thousands of soldiers felt as they moved through the Vietnamese jungles and engaged in fire fights across South Vietnam. These men were made to fight for people that didn't want their help. Indeed, Chris even says “these fuckers don’t want us here! Who the fuck they think we’re fighting for?” Many Vietnamese peasants joined the NVA because of their desire to have the Americans out of their country. The people that US soldiers were suppose to be fighting for become the people they fought against.
Chris shoots at the ground in front of the man for a while, and then stops. The gravity of what he has just done along with all the other things he's seen finally catches up with him and his anger quickly gives way to profound sorrow. The Vietnam War taxed the minds of US soldiers in a similar way. Much like Chris, US soldiers were emotionally exhausted by the end of the war because everything thing they had done and seen weighed on their shoulders. Psychological disorders like PTSD were evidence for the toll taken on their souls.
If you were to look at Platoon’s script for this scene, all you need to do is replace Chris with United States Soldiers and One legged Vietnamese man with Vietnamese peasants, and you would have a perfect interpretation of the dialogue between these two groups during the Vietnam War.
