Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm very proud of 'Platoon,' but at the end of it I was done. I was done.
My younger brother is a decorated combat veteran and was a platoon leader in Iraq.
You know what, I remember being on my T-ball team and telling people about 'Platoon.'
I've done about six comedies. Oddly enough, the script came to me from one of the guys in Platoon.
The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
The greatest honor of my life was to lead these men in my platoon, even though it was a war that I and they disagreed with.
We had a master sergeant present us with the Bronze Star of Valor he had gotten because he had felt we were the eighth men of the platoon.
I questioned everything. I didn't see a character developed in Platoon at all. The character in Blue Velvet was much more fascinating to me.
The first war movie I ever saw was 'Platoon,' and I was eight months pregnant. So my husband, producer Charles Roven, wasn't sure I'd make it.
The only kind of movement you could make in the Navy was to be a platoon leader or one of those kinds of things as you got more senior in your Navy career.
On 'Platoon' I was offered in 1984 a very tiny part that Ivan Kane would go on to play. Then the financing fell out, and the film was scuttled for two years.
We had times in '66 and '67 when we would pick up a platoon of privates out of the receiving barracks the week before we even graduated the platoon that we were on!
Rough Riders took 13 weeks to shoot, plus a week of training. The same guy trained us trained the cast in Platoon. Except, instead of radios, we used bugles to signal.
I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.
I think as a rifle platoon and company commander your view is about 1,000 meters in front of you and you hope you can cover that ground and not have to back up and give it up again.
I think, generally, the NCOs and officers in a platoon or company want to take care of their soldiers, and they understand it doesn't run from nine to five, like in the civilian world.
I am a military police officer and I have served on two deployments; my first was to Iraq, in a medical unit, and my second deployment was to Kuwait, as a military police platoon leader.
Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, 'The Anderson Platoon' feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars.
When they ran out of cadre men they gave me my very own platoon and said, 'Here are 63 men, try to keep as many of them alive as you possibly can.' That was one of the more harrowing experiences of my life.
The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was 'The Anderson Platoon,' by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.
Although 'The Anderson Platoon' was what we would now call an 'embedded film' - with all the ambiguities that term implies - somehow Schoendoerffer got away with showing things as they really were from a grunt's perspective.
I want to make sure I have a system that allows me to know that the platoon sergeant and platoon commander aren't going to move at the same time when we come back from deployment. That sounds pretty simple, but it's really about data.
I'm concerned that we're sending these military men... facing an infectious disease that could be deadly. If they go to Iraq, and they fight ISIL, and they come home, they're not bringing ISIL with them and threatening their families or platoon mates.
We started at once to dig our trenches, half of my platoon stepping forward abreast, the men being placed an arm's length apart. After laying their rifles down, barrels pointing to the enemy, a line was drawn behind the row of rifles and parallel to it.
For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists... If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.
If you take away scale, the nature of the story changes. I made a joke the other day: if I were to try to make 'Glory' now, rather than be about a regiment, it would be about a platoon. It would be seven men in the woods rather than all the men on the beach.
Historically, Vietnam movies have been profitable. All of them. 'Platoon,' 'Full Metal Jacket,' 'Apocalypse Now,' 'The Deer Hunter.' You're looking at movies that have been not pretty successful, but very successful. The foreign numbers have been extraordinary.
People ask me about 'The Hurt Locker' a lot, and it's an incredible piece of filmmaking - as are 'Band of Brothers' and 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Apocalypse Now.' But they're not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood's idea of war.
The little platoon of the black community is the church. Our Christian faith is based on individual freedom from sin and the personal decision to find spiritual liberty that leads to a better life here on Earth and for eternity. On Sundays in America, the most conservative people can be found in black churches.
From the time I left the Marine Corps after serving as an infantry platoon and company commander in Vietnam, I decided that I would focus on immediate goals that inspired me to devote all of my energy to them, rather than putting together the more cautious and traditional building blocks of a predictable career.
