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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSB who wrote (69673)	1/1/2000 12:57:00 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

A pretty good description of the qualities you liked. I did not serve either, and therefore am also speculative in the matter. I was disappointed by what I considered to be a slackness and over- indulgence in "Platoon", for example in making the "good sergeant" Christ- like, and by the kind of moral conundrums proposed, which seemed to me to be of the "Lord of the Flies" variety: left to themselves in a brutal environment, how well will young men resist becoming mere brutes? In "Full Metal Jacket", the rationale for "abusive" military training is made clear, and the young men subjected to it are not damaged, with the exception of the one who is too dull to understand. The necessity of hardening those bred as civilians before interjecting them into combat, and the fact that it will save their life and perhaps their sanity, is underscored by the contrast in the fate of the one who does not understand. How would he have endured combat? Normally, he would be weeded out, and it was too bad that the others carried him, instead of letting him washout..... In the second part, essential moral dilemmas of the era are put forth in stark terms. A sniper uses the impulse to help one's comrades to draw others in the squad into the line of fire. Without that solidarity, the sniper is powerless. On the other hand, a unit cannot survive without solidarity. They know they should not try to recover the first man, or the next, but they cannot help but to try. In the end, after unnecessary loss of life, they discover that the sniper is one of the whores they had encountered earlier. She is badly wounded, hopeless, and begs to be killed, but they are torn. First, she is in pain, and will die anyway, so why not let her suffer? Second, she is a woman, and some of them had recently had sex with her, and so it is hard to shoot her in cold blood. Finally, the main character, Joker, shoots her dead, and is patted on the back for being "hardcore", although it is ambiguous whether it was hardcore or euthanasia. The main thing is the starkness of the decisions one may face, and the need to be "hardcore" to endure, which defines the lot of the combatant.......To me, the only other contender is "The Deerhunter"....