A Question of Righteousness: "Platoon"
It is extraordinarily difficult to convince someone they are not right. This is such common knowledge that the world is full of advice about how to go about the process. A vast multitude of How To Succeed At Business books and internet think pieces all promise the answers, from tips about overcoming objections to pecuniary schemes to strategies for convincing that obstinate relative at the proverbial Thanksgiving dinner table to believe in your favored brand of politics.
But as difficult as all this is, it pales in comparison to the difficulty of convincing someone they are not righteous.
Being right, for most people, is a matter of feeling as though they have command over the facts at hand, and have sifted through them to come to the right answer. Their ego is involved, that is, only as a matter of their opinion of their own abilities. When they are proved wrong, they can take it as meaning that those abilities haven't been sufficient: they haven't been good enough at understanding the issues or don't have a broad enough knowledge base. This definitely stings, but it doesn't cut all the way down, because the possibility that some of the facts have simply escaped their notice isn't a referendum on their identity.
Being righteous, on the other hand, goes to the core of who we are. Believing that we are on the right side of things – history, moral struggle, the proper way to treat other human beings – is a definitional element of our vision of ourselves. It's not a matter of facts or how much we know or how well we reason; it's a matter of the constituent materials of our being. Which means that the accusation that we might not be righteous cleaves us right to the core of our identity.
As with any historical event, there are innumerable ways to understand the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it's known in Vietnam) and the vital art it gave birth to. But perhaps one of the most important – and the one that indicates why that war is so worth contemplating – falls directly along the lines of this question of righteousness.
Platoon, made by Oliver Stone and released in 1986, is the story of Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a U.S. soldier in Vietnam in 1967. It's a semi-autobiographical tale – Stone served as an infantryman in the war – and the plot is both simple and deceptively complex.
Chris arrives in-country with a certain idealism. He comes from a privileged background and has dropped out of college and requested combat duty because he "figured why should just the poor kids go off to war and the rich kids always get away with it?" (A bemused soldier named King (Keith David) responds: "Shit. You got to be rich in the first place to think like that.") Throughout the course of the film, Chris finds this idealism steadily worn away to nothing.
It's not just that the war, like so many, is being fought by the poorest people in society. It's also that the unimaginable pressures of combat do terrible things to Chris and the soldiers around him. Their days are spent in a combination of exhaustion, horrific physical exertion, and terrifying danger. They find themselves benumbed to violence and cynical about death: almost immediately after arriving, another new recruit is killed in an ambush, and Chris notes that among the soldiers, the "unwritten rule is a new guy's life isn't worth as much because he hasn't put his time in yet."
Chris soon finds that the platoon he's in is split into two groups. One is led by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Beringer) and is composed of strait-laced, beer-drinking types who believe that their job is to prosecute the war to the fullest extent of their abilities, regardless of what that entails. The second group, which Chris falls into, is led by Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe). They smoke dope and see the war as a horror that has trapped them, a tragedy to be survived. Elias himself, who has served three tours, admits to Chris that in 1965 (the first year of the war) he thought America was going to win, but now he knows they're going to lose.
As the combat stress builds, the platoon loses one of its members in a particularly gruesome way. Immediately afterwards, they enter a small village and descend into atrocity. Chris fires his gun at the feet of a disabled Vietnamese man, making him "dance" and then watches as one of his platoon-mates named Bunny (Kevin Dillon) beats the man to death with the butt of his rifle; later, Chris intervenes to stop several other soldiers from raping a Vietnamese girl. Barnes murders the wife of the village headman and is only stopped from continuing to kill other civilians by Elias.
The tensions deepen when Elias announces that he's going to call for a court martial of Barnes for the murder of the woman in the village. This splits the platoon even further, and there’s talk on both sides of fragging one of the Sergeants. During a firefight the ineffectual Lieutenant Wolfe (Mark Moses) makes a mistake in calling in the artillery; it lands on top of the platoon and tears a number of them to pieces. During the confusion in the aftermath of this, Barnes catches Elias alone in the jungle and shoots him. He announces to the platoon that Elias was killed in combat, but as they're being air-lifted out they see Elias, wounded but still alive, running to escape the North Vietnamese soldiers. They realize that Barnes lied to them.
This leads to the culminating sequence of the film, a nighttime battle in which the Americans are overrun by the North Vietnamese. Chris is injured but survives, and in the morning after, he finds Barnes among the dead bodies in the burned-out jungle. Rather than helping him, Chris kills him, perhaps in retaliation for what Barnes did to Elias and perhaps as some futile and impossible attempt to assert some kind of "goodness" against all of the horror Barnes stands for.
The film ends with Chris on a helicopter leaving the field of battle. He notes that: "I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I'm sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for...'possession of my soul.' There are times since, I've felt like a child, born of those two fathers."
Beyond an attempt to capture the sheer psychological and physical destruction wrought on soldiers and civilians by a war, what Stone constructs in Platoon is an elegant metaphor. He breaks the American psyche into two twinned pieces, and tries to examine their opposition.
On one side are Barnes and the troops who follow him. What unifies them can perhaps best be described as a fundamental faith that their vision of the world is the only one that can be right, in particular as this relates to the violence they engage in. Aside from their most psychotic members, like Bunny, they do not love the war. But they do believe in their own rightness, both personal and national, and they do not question the use of killing in service of those things.
This is personified by Barnes, who is willing to kill civilians to further the ends of the war – the notion being that if the goal is to win, then one should do everything it takes to win – and also willing to kill his fellow American soldiers if they pose a threat to him. Everything is allowed, that is, because the war effort and his personal survival justify it. He clothes this (in terms that should be familiar to every politically aware American) as a matter not of choice or ethics, but of realism. This is most clearly stated when he visits the bunker where Chris and his group go to smoke dope. "Are you smoking this shit so as to escape reality?" he asks. "Me? I don't need this shit. I am reality."
Here is one of the greatest filmic depictions of the justifications forwarded throughout history by the steely-eyed American soul, a soul that is "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," in the words of D.H. Lawrence. The depredations heaped on the self and the world are a matter (in this view) of having the unflinching fortitude necessary to do what needs to be done. The questions of why it needs to be done, or if there is another way, are put down as the questions of fools or weaklings. Beneath this, always unstated (and tied very deeply into the religiosity that runs like bedrock beneath so much American thought), is a faith that what they are doing is right because they are Americans. They are not the "gooks" or the "zips" or the "nips" or the "krauts" or the "hajjis" or any of the rest of the masses they racially dehumanize and then kill. They're Americans.
Opposed to this in Platoon is the other side of the American soul, represented by Elias and the troops who follow him and, in particular, Chris himself. This part of the American psyche possesses a gentler, more idealistic vision of the world. Chris volunteers to do his part out of fairness to others, so that it's not just the poor who will have to fight. Elias, although a lethal warrior, struggles to maintain a sense of the rules of war, which do not allow for the torture or murder of noncombatants. Although Chris breaks down in the village and torments the disabled man, his conscience has not been burned out of him: he stops the rape, screaming at his fellow soldiers: "She's a human being!"
There is an attempt, in this different side of America, to do the right thing. There is a belief in the power to make the world better, to make coherent rules and draw coherent lines even in the most terrible of circumstances. It is a belief in humanity and in the possibility of humanity. Perhaps the most moving scene in the film is one in which Chris and the other soldiers dance to Smokey Robinson's "The Tracks of My Tears": it is a moment of brotherhood and joy, a recognition that beauty can be found even in horror.
Under this second vision, violence and cynicism are not "reality" but a justification for moral weakness. America is not right simply because it is America, but because of the worth of these values it embodies. Fair. Rule-bound. Oriented toward the worth of every human being. To break these values is not realism but depravity, a betrayal of the higher principles that give meaning to action.
If these are two of the sides of the American historical character, and I think they are, the genius of Stone's film lies in the way it reveals how often they move into congruence, becoming insuperable. On the level of character, this is the truth that lies at the end of Chris's journey. His idealism is gone. Elias is dead, consumed by the war and killed by a countryman. And Chris himself has murdered Barnes, just as Barnes murdered Elias. The violence – initiated for noble ends – has pulled him in and become its own justification. There is no escape from it, no way to harness it for virtue without becoming a killer. As he notes in the closing, he is as much a child of Barnes as he is of Elias.
This is also the film's understanding of the Vietnam War writ large, and its summation of the great assault on the notion of American righteousness occasioned by that war.
The loss of innocence Chris endures stands in for the shock endured by the nation as a whole. This was not simply that we were wrong in the way we prosecuted the war, or wrong to have begun it in the first place. It was that the American vision itself, the American persona, might also contain – ineluctably joined to its rectitude – a strain of violence, a tendency to justify domination as realism. It was the realization of the capacity for American evil, not despite its virtues but as an element of them.
This is a difficult pill to swallow. It's always far harder to wonder if you are not righteous than it is to wonder if you are simply wrong.
It was at least in part this confrontation with itself that fundamentally changed American life in the aftermath of the war. And it was also in part this confrontation that led to the moment of artistic ferment (in film and elsewhere) of those years. The discussions of the long tail of these things, and of whether the realizations they involved still stand or have been swept under by yet another tide of American moral confidence – these will have to wait for another time.
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