I remember seeing Platoon for the first time. …

I remember seeing Platoon for the first time. I was a cadet at the West Point Prep School, and I went with two of my fellow cadets, Dan and Trevor.

We were young and gung-ho, itching for adventure and eager to prove ourselves as soldiers and future officers. All three of us had our hearts set on becoming infantry officers. War still came to us through a romantic lens. We had grown up on John Wayne films and stories in which courage was clean, sacrifice made sense, and the good guys were easy to spot.

Then we watched Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

When the film finished, the three of us sat in the theatre in silence. None of us rushed to speak. The screen had shown us a version of war stripped of the heroic distance we were used to: mud, fear, cruelty, confusion, men coming apart, and moral lines disappearing under pressure. I can’t say the film showed us the reality of war—we hadn’t been there, and a film is still a film—but it cracked the story through which we had been imagining it.

Sitting there in silence, we were left with a question none of us had carried into the cinema:

What had we signed ourselves up for?

The memory returned while watching Kevin B Lee’s video essay, “Are we ever really done seeing a movie? On Platoon and memory”. Lee follows the film beyond the screen, into family memory, identity, racism, and the afterlife of the viewing itself. His piece made me wonder whether we ever finish seeing the films that disturb the stories we live by.

Perhaps that night wasn’t simply the first time I saw Platoon. It was the beginning of all the times I would see it again in memory—the three of us sitting in the dark as the credits rolled, young men still wanting to become infantry officers, but no longer quite able to mistake that desire for a John Wayne film.