reactions to the hell that is war. Sgt. Barnes displays vicious, unexplained wounds on his face. He makes no attempt to hide these. From one view he looks normal, from another he looks positively robotic. He is literally mean as a snake. These are the exact words that MM uses to describe himself. He says he "freaked a little,...the Army objected to the way I started taking enemy scalps and wearing them on my pistol belt" (Wheeler/Becker 278). Both of these characters are alike in their violent reactions to their war experience. While that seems redundant, war of course is violent, both these reactions were extreme. Sgt. Barnes ends up dead, shot by his own man. MM is at loose ends without a job, restless, (Wheeler/Becker 279). The soldiers in this war were not supported in many ways that soldiers in other wars were. They definitely did not have the support of the American people judging from the interviewees' experiences; "It was worse when I got home. I came back into the Los Angeles airport and was spit on and called a baby killer and a mother raper" (Wheeler/Becker 275). They also did not have the support of the people whom they were trying to help, the South Vietnamese. This was illustrated in the movie and expressed by the interviewees, simply put, "The Vietnamese hated us' (Wheeler/Becker 278).The South Vietnamese were caught between a rock and a hard place. If they associated with American soldiers they would be punished by the Vietcong. If they associated with the Vietcong they would be punished by the Americans, as was the village in the movie. It was their country and they had everything to lose.One device used in the film, Platoon, was portraying the American soldiers as being very extreme. They were either psycho baby-killers or total cowards who would hide under a dead soldier to avoid battle. The in-the-middle normal soldiers portrayed in the movie seemed like very weak characters. Well, in a sense you...
