32. Goodnight Saigon &...

Lyrics

We met as soul-mates
On Parris Island
We left as inmates
From an asylum.
And we were sharp
As sharp as knives
And we were so gung ho to lay down our lives.

We came in spastic
Like tame-less horses
We left in plastic
As numbered corpses
And we learned fast
To travel light
Our arms were heavy but our bellies were tight

We had no home-front
We had no soft soap
They sent us Playboy
They gave us Bob Hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to Jesus Christ with all of our might

We had no cameras
To shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe
And played our Doors tapes
And it was dark...
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we'd write

(Chorus)
And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together

Remember Charlie?
Remember Baker?
They left their childhood
On every acre
And who was wrong?
And who was right?
It didn't matter in the thick of the fight...

We, held the day,...
In the palm of our hands
They, ruled the night
And the night, seemed to last as long as six weeks
On Parris Island
We held the coastline
They held the highland
And they were sharp
As sharp as knives
They heard the hum of the motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive

(Repeat chorus)


I am a fan of Billy Joel. Both this song and Piano Man (his best) are some of the most unironic and shamelessly sentimental songs ever made. But Billy Joel makes them work. And he is also great when making more conventional pop and rock, like She's Always a Woman or We Didn't Start the Fire. There have been made many movies about Vietnam, but there cannot be any doubt which movie should be linked to this song about the experiences of a soldier in the Vietnam War.

The Movie: Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

I once followed an elective called 'Vietnam as a political analogy'. My final paper for this course was an analysis on how Oliver Stone's Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July represented America's experience in Vietnam. (Unfortunately I can't find this essay). During this course I had seen Platoon twice, after having already seen it once before. Seeing Platoon three times, means that I have seen Platoon once, or perhaps even twice too many times. As you can see, I am not really a fan of the film and I chose not to see it again before writing this piece. I actually am a fan of Oliver Stone. Born on The Fourth of July is a really great film, and JFK is only slightly less. And I think that W, Stone's film about George W. Bush is really underrated.

Coincidentally, I followed this elective on Vietnam around the time that Charlie Sheen had his famous meltdown (I am a rock star from Mars!). Watching Platoon around that time, I had the feeling that you could make one of those silly quizzes in which you make people guess which line is said by Charlie Sheen during his meltdown, and which line is said by Chris Taylor, Sheen's character in Platoon. Some of the dialogue and narration (Sheen is the narrator) in Platoon is simply insanely and incredibly pretentious and meaningless. Some examples:
 "Maybe I finally found it, way down here in the mud. Maybe from down here I can start up again. Be something I can be proud of without having to fake it, be a fake human being".
"I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there".
"Day by day, I struggle to maintain not only my strength but my sanity. It's all a blur. I have no energy to write. I don't know what's right and what's wrong anymore. The morale of the men is low. A civil war in the platoon. Half the men with Elias, half with Barnes. There's a lot of suspicion and hate. I can't believe we're fighting each other when we should be fighting them" These lines are even more unconvincing, because Charlie Sheen just isn't a very good dramatic actor. (I actually do think that he is a pretty great comic actor). Thus the movie sometimes comes very close to becoming a parody of itself.

But the lines aren't the only problem. It often seems as if Oliver Stone somehow thinks he is making very subtle points about the Vietnam war. But there is no subtlety in this movie. Almost every shot is filled with incredibly obvious symbolism. This is most obvious in the famous death scene of Sgt. Elias. Neither Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) or Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) are ever really presented as normal human beings. They are the epitomization of respectively good and evil. And Chris Taylor, who is torn between them is of course America. Although to be fair, that is slightly less obvious and he is a bit more of a human being. Thus when Elias dies, at the hands of Barnes, it is very obvious that Stone wants to say that goodness died and evil prevailed in America during the Vietnam war. But this seems to be not obvious enough for Stone. So he makes Dafoe strike a Jesus-like pose when he dies. And it still isn't enough for Stone. So he ramps up the sentimental music and shows Dafoe's death repeatedly and in slow motion. It must be said though that the constant struggles and fighting between Elias and Barnes (good vs. evil!) did provide the most entertaining parts of the movie. Dafoe and Berenger are good actors and it is quite enjoyable to see them go at each other. It is quite unfortunate that both of them are a bit forgotten now.

Besides all this Oliver Stone's message here is quite questionable. He doesn't actually say that the Vietnam war was bad, because it was morally wrong, and because many Vietnamese and Americans died. This movie hardly cares about the Vietnamese. Stone claims the war was wrong, because it divided Americans and made America lose its apparent innocence. I do not think that this was his intention, but it seems a bit as if he is saying that America killed a lot of Vietnamese for the wrong reasons. But if the reasons for killing the Vietnamese had been good, the Vietnam war would have been a good war. And that the highest cost of the war, wasn't the fact that many people died, but the fact that it made some Americans mad at each other.