Throughout this movie, we can see an internal conflict within Chris and within the group of soldiers. The way this war was portrayed, it was more of a mental battle and that deeply affected the physical aspect of it. The soldiers had a lot to deal with mentally and it showed. Through Chris, we saw his perspective of the war change over time. When he first arrived, he was very optimistic and positive about how the war was going to go. It’s not long after he gets there that his positivity is quickly killed by the bad morale of everyone else there. Eventually, his optimism went away and reality was setting in that there was nothing good about what he was doing or the cause of the war. The way the movie played out, we saw each character have some type of internal conflict that they had to deal with whether it was racism, power dynamics, or even just coming to terms with the violence of war. There was also conflict between the soldiers because of actions that were wrong in every way. The breaking point for the group was the scene in the village. Many of them engaged in actions that were morally and ethically wrong in every way, and some didn’t agree but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
I think what it all came down to was the resentment for the war that they all had. They didn’t agree with the war because they didn’t think that the United States should’ve been involved in the first place. The soldiers hated the acts they had to commit because they were horribly gruesome. They also hated the fact that they were there in the first place, doing a job that no one else in the country wanted to do either. There was just a lot of anger in most of them and it created a lot of conflict towards each other rather than the actual enemy. What got the best of the soldiers was the attitude that everyone there was going to die. At one point in the movie, someone said, “Everybody gotta die sometime.” All of the soldiers had this attitude that even though they would like to make it out, they were going to die there. They looked at the new soldiers as replacements for the bodies that were already dropped and that’s why they had respect for the people that were there longer. They respected them for being able to make it for as long as they did. A lot of it had to do with the gruesomeness that they saw and had to be a part of. No matter how much they fought, they didn’t seem to be making any progress to give them a sign of hope. Everything was just so bad for them that they thought if they were going to make it out of there, they’d be lucky, even if they were medically discharged.
I agree that much of the conflict was internal or between the soldiers themselves. I found this interesting, as they were all fighting for the same side, yet they didn’t act like it. After the village scene the soldiers were divided. At the end of the movie, he says “the war was really between ourselves” (or something along those lines) and I think that really speaks volumes. No one can win a war against other when they are fighting themselves.
It’s definitely interesting to see how each character changes because of the war. It’s obvious that everyone hates being there and there is no real sense of community between the platoon that is often showed in other war film. The Vietnam War definitely had a different feeling and dynamic compared to other wars because of the opposition to it, the difficult conditions, and the horrible moral.
It is extremely interesting to watch the effects of war tear away at the soldiers. I’ve read books about Vietnam that describe this in some capacity but it is such a different experience to watch it. Watching it makes me more real to me than reading it. Did this internal/mental battles each solider was fighting have an effect on their fighting in Vietnam and the loss of the war?