Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When I saw Platoon the first time I had trouble staying still. It seemed every five minutes, or so something on the screen would remind me of Nam. Finally, the last part of the movie , where they were overrun, I had to leave. My body was re-acting to the night, to the LP getting killed and the words of Vietnamese the North Vietnamese were yelling became too much. I started flashing back, because we had been overrun during TET68. My girlfriend stayed with me and at last got me calmed down( along with the Lorazepam my psychiatrist gave me) and we left. It wasn't until the third time I watched it that I could sit all the way through, still wasn't easy. When you're overrun, just like the movie, you're filled with( what I called) Bloodlust! You are killing everything that doesn't look like an American. I don't have a lot of memories about it except for snippets of individual actions I was in. It's mass confusion and, like the movie, when the commanding officer expected that his company was losing, he called in what's called " Broken Arrow", which means an American unit is being wiped out and needs all possible assistance and the Air Force responded. The CO called them down right on top of his unit. If you'll check your history, we didn't surrender in Vietnam. We didn't talk about it, it was understood that we would all go down fighting to the last man. We didn't give quarter, nor did we ask for it. We always went to the knife in our fights, you kill me or I'll kill you. In our case, our CO called in artillery on our position to kill the enemy that was killing all of us. There's always survivors of this, where if we just kept fighting, all would die. Platoon was the closest I'd seen to action like it was. Just as an aside, we were overrun on Hwy 13( Thunder Road) close to Cambodia and that part of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Oliver Stone had been there and he got it right on the fighting.