254 PLATOON
in February 1987 and four wins in March: Best Picture (Arnold Kopelson); Best
Director (Oliver Stone); Best Editing (Claire Simpson); and Best Sound ( John
Wilkinson, Richard Rogers, Simon Kaye, and Charles Grenzbach). Platoon was also
honored with two BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, and the DGA Award for Out-
standing Directing. The critical response was, likewise, overwhelmingly positive.
Roger Ebert gave it the maximum four stars and praised Stone for making a war
movie devoid of “false heroics,” “standard heroes,” or a “carefully mapped plot,”
but one that dares to show an American atrocity perpetrated against Viet nam ese
civilians. Ebert: “ After seeing Platoon, I fell to wondering [how] Stone was able to
make such an effective movie without... making it [merely] exhilarating. Here’s
how I think he did it. He abandoned the choreography that is standard in almost
all war movies. He abandoned any attempt to make it clear where the vari ous forces
were in relation to each other, so that we never know where ‘our’ side stands and
where ‘they’ are” (Ebert, 1986). In his review, Vincent Canby described Platoon as
a “singular achievement... possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam
War since Michael Herr’s vigorous and hallucinatory book Dispatches” (Canby,
1986).Reel History Versus Real History
As one of only a handful of bona fide Vietnam veterans involved in the making of
major motion pictures about the Vietnam War— Gus Hasford, Patrick Sheane Dun-
can, and James Carabatsos are others— Oliver Stone was able to bring a high
degree of authenticity to Platoon. Viewers may won der if there really was as much
internecine conflict and drug use among American soldiers in Vietnam. Certainly,
in some platoons, there were— though heavy drug use was more common in rear
echelon areas. Viewers should not won der, though, about anti- civilian atrocities
committed by U.S. troops, which became notorious after the My Lai Massacre (16
March 1968) was exposed to the nation by New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh
in October 1969. More recently, American war crimes in Vietnam have been
exhaustively documented by Nick Turse in his controversial book, Kill Anything
That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013). What ever the actual scope of
these atrocities, they did happen, as they do in all wars. Regarding the film’s histori-
cal veracity, TV journalist Ted Koppel (Nightline) assembled a group of six Vietnam
combat veterans in Chicago for a private screening of Platoon on 3 January 1987, just
after the film was released, and all of them readily confirmed the film’s truthfulness.
Frank Kauzlarich, who served in 1968–1969 as a he li cop ter crew chief, told Koppel,
“The character portrayals were outstanding; they didn’t ‘Hollywood it up.’ They had
the details right about the leeches— and the dust everywhere when (the college
kid) arrived in Vietnam in the very first scene. I saw the same dust and the body
bags when I first got there, and I thought to myself, ‘What the hell am I getting
into?’ The characters were all right on: the good, the bad, and the ugly, you might
say. Also it showed the things you had to do— the people you had to leave behind.”
Another veteran, Terry Tidd, who served in 1966 with the Marine I Corps near Da
Nang, said “I want to get my ma and dad to see this movie. I got a 13- year- old boy
I might want to take. It may be too heavy, but he’s asked me a lot about Vietnam,