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Originally Posted by Adm.Lee
Platoon came out that same autumn, but I really don't think that did much for Army recruiting.
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.
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Gee, more info. I was reading
Soldiering on in a dying war: the true story of the Firebase Pace incidents and the Vietnam drawdown, and on p. 214, we have this:
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[The 271st VC Regiment] emerged at midnight New Year's Day 1968 to attack Fire Support Base Burt on the Vietnamese/Cambodian border. This time they clashed with elements of the 25th Infantry "Tropic Lightning" Division. In what was described as 'savage and desperate' fighting, the Vietcong were repulsed under a hail of bombs and bullets, including 1,500 mortar and artillery rounds and 200,000 rounds of small arms. When daylight came, more than 400 enemy bodies were counted. The defenders of this base included a young enlisted man named Oliver Stone. His recollections of this attack would form the basis of the climactic ending scenes in the movie Platoon twenty years later.
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