The Vietnam War in American Film - Essay Example

This movie follows the war in a systematic manner whereby there is periodic music that supplements the letters. The movie starts in a very jovial and interesting manner on the beach and with boys singing. Kids are diving into the waves and coming up wet, on the shores of the beach there is a cooler of beer placed under a palm tree. This place is called Vietnam and looks to be a fun and happy place to be. The soldiers are very excited and carefree you would think they are kids or high school children.

There is also a soundtrack behind the scenes of the voices of the soldiers expressed through the words they wrote in their letters (Edelman 2002). They are speaking of the confidence they had gained to fight and the developing friendship as they were each brother’s keepers. They also say that Vietnam is a world very different from the American cities; most of Vietnam is covered with vegetation and thick forests that look scarily. This place cannot be compared to the towns and cities they left back home.

It reaches a point when war gets very tough and the voices of the soldiers drastically change and you can sense some pain and sorrow in their tone. Soldiers are being injured very badly, they bleed profusely and eventually die due to the gunshots and boom attacks they get from the enemies. Some of the soldiers don’t get the chance to survive they die while others are left seriously wounded. The words in this movie are of the soldiers themselves, and most of the images in this film are taken from TV news footage of the war.

There are also soldiers cleaning their weapons to get ready for the war. Most of these soldiers did not survive as they died in the war. The friendly South Vietnamese and the hostile North Vietnamese get into the war and in the process, they wound and kill many U.S. soldiers. In retaliation, the U.S. considers a nuclear response. The letters range from poetic ones to bitter and sarcastic ones. This movie offers an emotional scene with a lot of tragedies, homesickness among soldiers, and the devastation of the war which keeps mounting day by day (Dittmar 1990). There are also fight jets landing with more soldiers from the U.S. as they flow the wounded back home the gunshots and blasts of booms can be heard all over. This is a very sorrowful movie.