A Study in Racial Antagonism

Rating: 8/10 (1 September 2006)

This is a good movie, and a brave one, for several reasons. The plot and other elements of the film have been covered elsewhere, so I'd like to just make a few comments on the role of race in the Vietnamese conflict.
The combat experience in Vietnam was an almost perfect mirror of a famous social psychology experiment by Muzafer Sheriff called, "The Robbers Cave" study. This may look a little dull but it's important and relevant.
Under controlled conditions, Sheriff brought two matched groups of boys to a Boy Scout Camp in the middle of nowhere. In Phase One, the two groups had no contact with one another but gave themselves names (The Eagles and the Rattlers) and lived separately. They developed an intense in-group bonding.
In Phase Two, the Eagles and the Rattlers were brought together in competition with one another -- sports and so forth. And each group developed an intense antagonism for the other, an "us-against-them" set of attitudes. The hostility grew so strong that the experimenters cut Phase Two short so it wouldn't become physically dangerous.
In Phase Three, the competitive tasks were removed and replaced by tasks requiring cooperation for the good of both groups together. The crises were artificially created by the experimenters and involved joint jobs like hauling water when the pump broke down, pulling a truck when the engine quit, and so on. The conflict disappeared when it was replaced by what Sheriff called "a superordinate goal" or "a superordinate enemy."
The film illustrates the kind of bonding that takes place when the Eagles and the Rattlers are faced with a superordinate enemy, in this story the VC. There's no question that racial identities were retained, but they were overshadowed by allegiance to the group. They had to be, for the sake of survival. The casual and sometimes friendly interaction between African-Americans and whites is even more surprising when you consider that this takes place in the late 1960s, the era of Black Power, the Zebra killings, campus takeovers, and so on. None of that social movement filters into Vietnam. There may or may not be atheists in foxholes, but there seem to be far fewer racists.
Enough boring stuff. I mentioned that the film was brave because Stone was the first guy to come out with a film that dealt directly with the ordinary grunts in the Vietnam war. No politics or anything. None of that, "Why are we here?" business. The war is just a matter of getting through one day after another, shorter and shorter, until you can get out of it.
The usual stereotypes are either absent entirely or weak. Nobody is a wise guy from Brooklyn. And there is no braggart from Texas. And Sgt. Elias is not "good" in contrast to Sgt. Barnes' "bad" guy. He's a better human being than Barnes, but not a better soldier.
Overall, it's an instructive film coming from somebody who was there. And the director doesn't try to drive us nuts with razzle dazzle techniques as he sometimes does in his later work.