R | 2h | Drama, War | 6 February 1987 (USA) I used to tend bar near Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, which, in the early ’90s, was Crack Cocaine Central. We had an interesting regular: Freddy, in his mid-30s, wore combat boots, an army jacket, skull tattoos, an drab-olive green bandana, and lamented that he’d missed his mission in life. Freddy felt deeply that he should have been in “The ‘Nam.” Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” shows why. The actual Vietnam War was hell on earth, yet enough time has passed—and Hollywood’s tendency to romanticize war being what it is—that, knowing America, a nostalgic subculture that romanticizes and fetishizes that war has been generated. I feel it myself (as I imagine many men do, who never served) when I’m in an Army-Navy store and see beret-wearing skulls on Vietnam-era patches saying “82nd Airborne, Death From Above,” “Mess With the Best, Die Like the …