6. Casualties of War (1989)
Brian De Palma decided to turn his hand to war movies with this 1989 effort which is based on a true event - the incident on Hill 192 in 1966. It stars Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn. Michael J. Fox plays Max Erikkson, a soldier in the Vietnam war who has had a lot of near misses with his unit, battling the Viet Cong. Indeed, he cheats death twice in a very small space of time. His sergeant - Tony Meserve (Sean Penn) orders the boys to take a young Vietnamese girl as a sex slave for the troop. Erikkson begs them not to, but he is beaten up and cast aside as the men take turns in raping the girl. The girl is later knifed by a soldier called Clarke during battle. Meserve wants no trace of their crimes left had ordered Erikkson to kill her but he point blank refused. She wanders onto the bridge for help, Erikkson tries to assist her, but Meserve holds him back and she is shot. Erikkson refuses to forget about the events despite a death threat being on his head. He eventually succeeds in getting the main protagonists in the kidnap and rape of the girl satisfactorily sentenced. A very scary case of what happens when morals and ethics are tossed away in war time (it may sound bizarre but the art of war is governed by rules and regulations enshrined in international law and civilian rape is definitely against the rules). I think atrocities come hand in hand with war - any war, all the time due to moral corruption and the sense of power that weapons give a man. And there is genuine hatred in there, too. However, the US authorities failed in Vietnam to teach the soldiers the basics of the Geneva Convention. There is a lot more emphasis on it nowadays when soldiers are put through their training. But to be honest, I think the soldiers in Vietnam were just trained to be killing machines and this originated from their leaders and the policies they enacted in Vietnam.