Sadly enough I passed up the chance to have a valid excuse to watch Full Metal Jacket again. This film is a right of passage for every college student and not many people have made it to adulthood without quoting it or making a lude comment about a five dollar bill. With that I chose to broaden my horizons and watch Casualty of War again. Having seen this film as a kid (I don't know what that says about my raising) I had to watch it again to freshen my memory and maybe take something new from it.
Casualty of War is a gripping realty that was the Vietnam war. At first glance you want to charge the four guilty men on the spot and peg them as monsters. Upon further review, I couldn't help but go back to the beginning of the movie when Micheal J. Fox was telling his platoon that he had only been in Vietnam for three weeks. They had apparently been there much longer, and proceeded to rag him for such a comment. This resonated with me during the scene at the hooch as they carried out their premeditated rape. I couldn't help but think these boys didn't arrive there with such lifeless souls. This is when I had a realization that maybe this was a direct correlation with how much time they had spent in the bush, although in no way a valid excuse. They had killed and seen brothers killed. They had worked to save natives that turned and aided the Vietcong. They had been witnesses to such travesties that many of us thanks to them will never have to. I guess all of this has a way of twisting the mind and fading the line of right and wrong. They stopped seeing human life as precious and only saw American life as valuable. They put a scarlet letter on every native and forgot their purpose for being there was to help these people. However, when you don't know who to help or who to kill, you start treating all of them like animals and in turn become one yourself. This is just my pour attempt to understand a horrid act, or what may have happened to the inner Psyche of these men/boys. Given the fact that their inner conscience was dead, the fifth member of the platoon was there to breath life back into it, and they chose not to accept.
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The first time I saw Casualty of War, all I could think was, "Gosh! Alex P. Keaton is fighting in Vietnam!" Yes, my cultural reference points are in need of some tweaking.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best films I've seen about the Vietnam was was Tigerland with Colin Farrell. This was made before he was, you know, Colin Farrell. He sports a Texas twang, so it came as no small shock to hear him on the DVD extras with an Irish accent. He does a great job, and it's a very good film.