Platoon

                Serving in a war changes a person. It changes a person dramatically. It can totally change someone’s point of view, their whole outlook. This type of action and change is shown during the movie Platoon. People come in to serve with one view or belief, and leave with another.

 In this movie, Charlie Sheen’s character, Chris Taylor, comes to serve in Vietnam.  He comes from a rich family, and he had everything set out, he had it made. However, he dropped out of college, and decided to fight overseas, just to be a rebellious kid to his parents, and to prove them wrong. He did it to show them that he was capable of doing such things. He comes in, and doesn’t realize what he is getting into.

There are many conflicts going on during his deployment. Soldiers at camp often have disagreements. Their leaders are often disagreeing and feuding as well. It was almost like there are two sides on their camp. Sargent Elias is more of a happy and loving personality. He cared about the soldiers, and thus, the soldiers were fond of him.

The conflict in camp is mainly between Sargent Elias, and Sargent Barnes. Sargent Barnes was more of a “tough love” type of leader. He always wanted control of what went on. He didn’t care as much about all of the soldiers, he was much more of a selfish leader than Elias. These all caused the majority of camp to not like him near as much as they did Elias.

Elias and Barnes had a lot of conflicts, and they didn’t always get along well. Then, during battle, Elias was running back towards the American soldiers, and Barnes shot him. Not many people saw this, but Chris Taylor did. Taylor was shocked that anyone would do such a thing to their own fellow soldier, and it upset him a great deal. However, time went on, and people started to learn to live without Elias, no matter how much they liked it or not.

Then, another chaotic battle occurred. The Vietnamese ran invasions all over the American camp, they had them surrounded. The American soldiers had nowhere to go. They were scrambling, fighting for their lives, trying to survive. Many from both sides died, and Sargent Barnes was wounded badly. He called to Taylor “get me a medic, boy”. Taylor then pointed his gun at Barnes, and shot him dead right then and there.

War is a complicated and tough thing to go through. As Charlie Sheen’s character points out, “I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.  The enemy was in us.” He is saying that not only are they fighting against the Vietnamese, they are fighting against themselves. It makes the war so much tougher when you are fighting both the enemy, and yourselves. Trying to deal with all the external conflicts would be hard enough, I would imagine. And not only did they deal with that, but they were working against themselves too. That’s why the war over there was so tough for them. It was almost like they couldn’t make any progress when they fought amongst themselves, and that was a common theme for that group.