American
combat troops in Vietnam were not particularly revered, and
there have been few war heroes aside from those who suffered
as prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton. Although some have
attributed the American defeat to various factors, it was
not until the release of Tigerland, directed
by Joel Schumacher, that the American public could catch a
glimpse of the deeply flawed military training before assignment
to Vietnam. Ross Klavan, one of the screenwriters, based the
film on his experiences. The movie takes place in September
1971 at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where infantry soldiers were
given eight weeks of basic training and then one week of combat
training. The portion of the base for realistic jungle combat
training, with conditions approximating those in Vietnam,
was called Tigerland. We become acquainted with several young
recruits and why they were in the infantry. Although most
were drafted to fight for the lost cause, Jim Paxton (played
by Matthew Davis) decided after two years of college that
experience in Vietnam would be invaluable for his chosen career
as a writer. Paxton provides the voiceovers at the beginning
and end of the film, but most of the story centers on Roland
Bozz (played by Colin Farrell), who questioned all the inhumane
elements of the training and helped several misfits to get
discharged from the army. According to the film’s tagline,
"The system wanted them to become soldiers; one soldier just
wanted to be human." We see that most of the training involved
verbal humiliation, with no praise even for successful marksmanship;
although the purpose might have been to uproot individualistic
thinking, presumably to show the need for teamwork, the actual
effect was to demoralize and thus sap the trainees of the
will to fight courageously or gloriously. We observe how young
men were instructed to use radio cables as instruments of
torture, presumably to extract information from future captured
Vietcong, and one hapless recruit assigned to maintain discipline
among his fellow trainees becomes the guinea pig when Bozz
walks away in disgust. Since the buddy system was not employed,
recruits channeled their anger due to the verbal humiliation
at one another, so many fights break out, and future psychopathic
killers emerge. One such lunatic is Wilson (played by Shea
Whigham). The climax of the film comes during a maneuver in
Tigerland, where Bozz and Paxton are hunted by Wilson, who
breaks regulations by using real bullets and injures Paxton.
The point of the film appears to be that American soldiers
were ill prepared to fight in a war that they knew was unpopular
because the training was utterly barbaric and chaotic. Superior
officers, knowing that no victory was possible, were instead
trying to train them to survive. Nearly a docudrama of actual
conditions of military training for Vietnam, the Political
Film Society has nominated Tigerland for an
award as best film exposé of the year 2000. MH
I
want to comment on this film
