Abstract
Abstract At the end of Oliver Stone’s 1986 film, Platoon, the protagonist, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), offers the quintessential statement of what I call the trope of friendly fire. In a voiceover Taylor tells us, “I think now looking back that we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves and the enemy was within us.” In Platoon, this story of Americans killing Americans in Vietnam is both literal and allegorical. At the heart of the film is the epic struggle between the evil sergeant Barnes, the figure of the war’s self-consuming violence, and the regenerative promise of Elias, the Christ-like figure of goodness sacrificed on the battlefields of Vietnam. The plot demands that Barnes kill Elias and that Chris Taylor, in turn, kill Barnes. Platoon is quite simply the story of the Manichaean struggle for a young man’s soul. Despite this overtly symbolic structure, the film has been often praised for its realistic depiction of the war. Tellingly, not only is Platoon’s allegorical structure defined by this trope of friendly fire, but its most realistic gesture is shaped by it as well.
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