Welcome to the Vietnam war.

Try, for a moment, to watch the film from the perspective of being one of the soldiers. At what point would you have become burnt out by the whole damn war?

But, you can't go home. You're not going to commit suicide. What is left to do? Try and cope, not lose your mind, try to save your brother's life because they just saved yours? Sit around and curse your fate, reminisce about a girl who's no longer going to write you because her educated college friends tell her it's immoral to support you? Talk about what you're going to do when you get back to America, and just pretend the odds are not 10-1 that you will only return to America in a body bag (if they can find enough of your pieces or identify what's left of them)?

Welcome to the Vietnam war.

Glad it's over. Ah, but there's the radio. Some voice far away has just told your sarg that you're not getting a lift-out, you've gotta take the hill. It ain't over. Back we go, more hamburger coming back down. Your brothers, no arms, no legs, no heads...the ones you get to before they breathe their last in your arms are no longer coherent, mumbling jibberish as life slips from their grasp, but you can't turn away because their eyes are locked on yours, as if they're trying to suck some of your life out of you and into them...

Government is out of touch. The enemy just keep coming (where do they come from? Where are their supply lines?). When you want to sleep, claymores and shells explode all around. When you think there are no more, there are more... you get on that annoying radio and call for help that ain't coming...and you know, deep down so you can hopefully avoid thinking about it, that the folks back home don't care that you are dying here. In fact, caught up in their socio-political upheaval, they celebrate your death as proof that being here at all is wrong. Your death is a trophy for anti-war protest.

And it dawns on you - all this don't mean nothing. Hopefully, death will be quick enough that you never have to face your mortality. Just a flash, a bang, and I'm gone. Gone where? Heaven? Hell (hey, I've been in the Vietnam war, how much worse is hell gonna be?) Or, just nothingness, a state of non-existence so deep I won't even know I no longer exist, and will never know I once existed. In which case (say it together now) it (this, this war, this life, any sense of meaning or value, anything to learn, anything to know, or think, or do...) - it don't mean nothing.

Welcome to the Vietnam war.