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Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b
That permission, or even simple aid from the US military, can however be yanked in a heartbeat -- it's how the unit in Heartbreak Ridge, for example, went from being Rangers to Marine Recon.
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That's kinda funny, 'cause I distinctly remember reading a newspaper interview with an Army general, I think it was the Fifth Army CG, when he came to my hometown in late 1986. When asked about recruiting, he noted the positive effect of
Top Gun for the Navy, and wished someone would make a movie about the Rangers in Grenada. That would have been just as
Heartbreak Ridge came out, so it might have been mentioned in respect to the Marines and their recruiting. I suspect the general did not know about the shift in the movie.
Platoon came out that same autumn, but I really don't think that did much for Army recruiting.
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A lot of the actions portrayed in Heartbreak Ridge did actually happen, but to Ranger units and not Marine units. (No unit had all that happen to them, however.)
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Speaking of that last movie, when I took a class on the Vietnam War, one of the guest speakers had been a rifleman in Oliver Stone's company, different platoon. IIRC, he said Stone was wounded and transferred to another division. He said that the first part of the movie was accurate, but the village sequence happened in the other division. I forgot to ask him about the big battle at the end.