Oliver Stone is a muckraker disguised as a moviemaker. He concocts films—Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon as a screenwriter, Salvador and now Platoon as writer-director—whose blood vessels burst with holy indignation. And he gets money for his Savonarola sermons because he films them for peanuts: $5 million for Salvador, $6 million for Platoon. This new one is an up-tempo dirge, an I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, about his experiences as a young grunt in Viet Nam. Stone means the drama, the carnage, the horror, the horror to be so white-hot they will cauterize and heal the wounds of war, and singe everyone's soul in the process. Well, not quite, but Platoon is still the most impressive movie to deal with the fighting in Viet Nam. Apocalypse Now was, by comparison, all machismo and mysticism; Stone's film is a document written in blood that after almost 20 years, refuses to dry.
In 1967 Stone, a Yale dropout who had taught school in Saigon, volunteered for the infantry in Viet Nam. Suddenly the preppie was surrounded by guys he never would have met back in the "world." Urban blacks were importing tactics of street survival to the jungle; Southern farm boys were digging foxholes that might be their graves. You established camaraderie with your sergeant by taking a whiff of marijuana that he'd blow through a rifle barrel. And too soon you were inside the madness of frontline patrols, a captive of the heat, the exhaustion, the insects, the hatred of men whose whims your life hung on. Every night you were shooting at V.C. soldiers, kids your age who were so close you could smell their fear too. Every day you invaded villages, where the frustration of an unseen enemy could drive you to crimes of My Lai sadism. And at the end of a mission, the corpses piled up, Americans and V.C. united at last, locked in charnel embrace.
It was the boot camp of hell, and a sensitive man could die from it. "You don't belong in the Nam, man," a warwise soldier tells Chris (Charlie Sheen), who stands in for Stone as the narrator of Platoon. "This ain't your place at all." It is, though, and that is the rite-of-passage tragedy the film describes. For Chris is torn between the conflicting charismata of two sergeants: Elias (Willem Dafoe), a natural jungle fighter, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), a pure-blooded killer. Both men have a nice sense of their power—over themselves, their men and the enemy. Each hates the other, and one of them, Barnes, is dangerously mad. Their examples, and Chris' rage, will forge the young soldier into a state-of-the-art Stone Age murder machine. He will forever carry visions of their spectacular and meaningful deaths.