Platoon appreciation of war (and life)
Pol Serrano. Barcelona
As Clausewitz
said, War is a mere continuation of politics by other means. And so in the
movie, Vietnam War is framed in the bipolar world after the Second World War,
were the two main powers in the world were the USA and the URSS. The Vietnam War
was one of the conflicts fought by the Americans to try to stop the advance of
communism in the republics of Indochina. The
strategy was to implement democracy and capitalism in the republics freed by
the Americans and therefore to establish a relation with those countries to
counter balance the soviet power.
In fact, the Vietnam
changed the view of the classic way of war. No more big armies clashing in a
clear battlefield, like happened in continental wars. For the sake of an
example, Americans had in mind the game of chess, were the victory comes easier
by “killing” the enemy’s pieces. However, the American strategy was not appropriate
in the Vietnamese battlefield. As we have seen in Platoon, the war is waged by
using commandos, or small platoons introduced in to the jungle to fight the
hidden soldiers, and resist traps and ambushes. The main aim of that war was
more than kill the enemies but to control territory.
It’s been said
that when Saigon fell due to the American withdraw, Coronel Harry Summers met
North Vietnamese leaders no negotiate the terms of the peace, and he told to
the Viet Cong leaders that they have never “win the Americans in any
engagement.” The Vietnamese leaders answered that it was “true, but that it was
also irrelevant”.
Why it did not
matter? Because the fact was that at the beginning of the war, the American
support toward Vietnam
was at 80%. At the end, it fell at 20%. Therefore, even if the Americans were
winning the engagements, the hippy revolution in America would not permit more death
people, hence, the war was not politically affordable. The war was over.
Finally, we have
to analyse the place were the war was fought. Vietnam was a dirty backwater full
of mosquitoes and snakes. It is a huge difference between the American
geography, were we rarely find such a humid and full of insects place. That
made the Asiatic destiny quite unpleasant and very annoying.
On the other
hand, the soldiers engaged in Vietnam,
suffered a quick deterioration: High consumption of marihuana, alcohol, opium
and morphine; the unpleasant conditions of the place; and add to that the usual
angst of the common soldier, who knew that he could not return from the next
raid. Nihilism was the main creed. Thus, the newbie’s crews that came from America died in
the first mission or suffered the corruption of the place. Henceforth, the freshmen’s
arrived from America
were not enough strong to resist the corruption, nor enough strong to impose
good manners. Therefore, Vietnam
was, in every aspect, a hard nut to crack.
The movie
inherently represents the resonant aphorism attributed to Plaute; namely, “Homo
homini lupus est”. As Hobbes put it in his De
Cive (1651) “Man to Man is an errant Wolfe”. And following the argument,
mankind has an inherent conflict within and among fellow citizens. Linking the
previous statement, we arrive to Heraclitus, who said, “War is the father of
all and king of all”; it is quite a realist statement. He says, sharp,
“Conflict does not interfere with life, but rather is a precondition of life”. Mixing
the two classics, we have a dangerous kind.
Platoon is not
an anti-war film. Or at list it is more than that. Platoon exemplifies the
stark contrast between morals politics and power politics. It is the
Machiavelli sentence: “The end justifies the means”.
To Sgt Bob Burns,
the ruthless bloodthirsty soldier, the end always justifies the means. So if he
has to shoot a young little girl to obtain some kind of information related to
the enemy’s position, he will. On the other side, there is Sgt Elias, picturing
the moral politics view; so he is waging war in a moral sense: he will not win
at any price, he has principles.
The picture
between moral and power politics is represented at the beginning. The first
approach with Sgt Burns is with a death body. Chris Taylor vomits when he sees
the Vietcong death body and Sgt Burns goes: “What the hell is the matter with
you Taylor? You are a simple son of a bitch”. On the other side, the approach
with Sgt Elias is quite different. He advises him nicely “next time [we go out]
you check with me, all right?” Therefore, the situations framed are quite
different. Elias is quite a candid person, naïve at times. Burns is a merciless
soldier; to him war is not a mean to an end, but a purpose for itself.
By confronting
those two characters, Stone is explaining two ways of waging war. Stone’s message
is that being the candid Elias does not represent the best way to survive and
vanquish the enemy; nor is the Burns way, which ends killing itself. But the two
features would make the perfect soldier. The perfect soldier would be Taylor, who
has the courage to stop the rape of a Vietnamese girl, but the guts to get
dirty and kill Burns. It’s the basics of Machiavelli: to do good, we sometimes
have to behave badly.
