Pain And Suffering In Vietnam Film

In the Vietnam trilogy of films, Stone admits to having learnt something about the concepts of pain and suffering. Through the movies, he became in touch with his suffering on `The Platoon' as a soldier. Then, after the Vietnam experience, Stone could live through the experiences of Ron Kovic in a wheelchair and empathize with what his brother in arms went through. Finally, through Le Ly, he was able to empathize with the experience of a Vietnamese peasant girl among other innocent victims of the war. The trilogy of Vietnam films gives the director and the audience the wider picture and idea of the Vietnam War (Riordan, p. 324).
Through Le Ly, Stone realized that although the soldiers passed the Viet peasants such as Le Ly, distrusting them and thinking they were sympathetic to the Viet Cong, they were actually right in doing so since, as he realized later, the Viet Cong deserved their sympathy. However, it was 20 years later that Stone discovered why the peasant Vietnamese rightly sympathized with the
However, these Vietnamese have never been given the credit of that suffering. Instead, later presidents such as Bill Clinton renewed the sanctions against Vietnam, further fuelling hatred against the Vietnamese. Ironically, the US continued to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II; countries that committed heinous atrocities on an enormous scale. In the case of the Vietnam conflict, the US has somehow lost its compassion and ability to make amends, pardon, reach out and shake the hand of an enemy and befriend them again (Riordan, p. 244). If all these actions were done to befriend Vietnam again, the USA would become a better country. Although some would treat Stone’s statements and thesis on the Vietnam conflict as political speeches, there could be truth in his stance on the