![Platoon Leader/River [VHS]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71itVHbeZHL.__AC_SY300_SX300_QL70_ML2_.jpg)
This is a great movie adapted from an outstanding book. But, like many movies prompted by books, realize there’s a bit of “artistic license” taken by the movie. Of a number of changes, I’ll call out just two: 1. Contrary to what the movie version dramatizes, the more or less autobiographical book’s area was not a jungle. It was a coastal plain located on the map just after the Vietnamese shoreline starts bending southward. 2. A second difference was that the girl with the missing arm in the book was more or less “pseudo-enemy,” not the sympathetic creature portrayed in the movie. She and her boyfriend were among a group of Viet Cong who the platoon had caught in an ambush. Her boyfriend was killed, but she was evacuated, treated—but her mangled arm could not be saved—and allowed to return and freely work in the fields. She was also not the book’s villager, a kindly woman looking after children by bartering rice to the Americans for C rations, who was found later tortured and killed by the Viet Cong as a traitor. Again these changes are just a sample of the many more differences between move and book but none that really change the character of the story.
I bought the book and movie and got them autographed by the author, my West Point classmate, many years ago. While you can read other reviews that describe various intriguing aspects of both the movie and book, this review is more about the author. Granted, he tells you in his first chapters that he went to West Point and was a boxing champion, but not much beyond that, and you only come to learn about him through his Vietnam experience. Here, I’d like to give you a little more about him, “following” his career, so that you can better appreciate the brilliant mind that crafted this book, a military classic that is required reading at West Point and ROTC.
Jim graduated with honors (number 26 out of 800 graduates; around the top 3%) at the United States Military Academy Class of 1969. After graduation, he attended the Airborne, Ranger, and Jungle Warfare schools before his deployment to South Vietnam with the storied 173d Airborne Infantry Brigade, the first major USA ground unit deployed in Vietnam, with Jim arriving at his newly assigned platoon’s base camp on 1 August 1971. His job, as detailed in “Platoon Leader,” was to have his platoon protect the hotly contested strategic hamlet in Binh Dinh Province.
While Jim’s book includes much advice weaved into his gripping story, I thought I’d share with you some advice he would give to platoon leaders today: “1. Master map reading; you always need to know where you are and where everything else that is important as well, especially the enemy, where you have to go, and how to get there; 2. Understand small unit tactics and how to apply them under quickly changing conditions that invariably mean the difference between life and death; 3. Check everything and maintain standards; avoid easing up to lighten the load on your soldiers only to end up killing them with kindness; 4. Be introspective, learn from your mistakes, consider what impact you are having on others, and try to do better.” Both at small unit level and at the level of operational doctrine, he believes that “defense is important, but you can never win without offense.”
Interestingly and as suggested by the book, the principles Jim learned as a champion collegiate boxer carried over directly to his military experience. He believes that a soldier does well to remember to “move, hit, and protect” in various combinations. “Sometimes you move to hit and/or protect; sometimes you hit so you can move and protect; and sometimes you protect as you stage to move and hit.” Jim has followed these principles throughout the rest of his sterling career, with command at every level from platoon through brigade.
Notable assignments later in Jim’s career included leading seminars at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at Ft. Leavenworth, after which he published another outstanding book and military classic, “The Defense of Hill 781,” about a battalion commander going through a grueling testing rotation at the Army’s National Training Center. Subsequently, after an assignment as Senior Military Assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Jim returned to SAMS as its Director, where he and his team drafted the Army’s keystone operational doctrine in 1993 (then known as field Manual 100-5). While I just a little humorously call Jim’s (James R. McDonough’s) edition the “King James” version, it was truly a significant advancement from prior manuals (with its inclusion of non-war operations) and the seminal foundation from which later versions only slightly deviate. Recall that doctrine is the ultimate integration and conceptualization of what a nation’s soldiers should think about, know, and train for to best fight and win its wars.
Jim’s final military assignment was as the brigade commander responsible for quick reaction contingency missions in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, most of Africa (less the Horn), and parts of the Middle East. His unit deployed to Rwanda in the closing weeks of the 1994 genocide and was ready to deploy to rescue UN peacekeepers held hostage by the Serbs in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995. The mission was called off at the last moment, as the peacekeepers’ release was negotiated (but the event ended in the massacre of over 8000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys).
Upon ending his military career, McDonough became Director of Strategy for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, then Director of the Florida Office of Drug Control. Finally, before his retirement, he became Secretary, Florida Department of Corrections. Not to forget, I should mention that Jim wrote the book “Limits of Glory: A Novel of Waterloo” in 1991.
With this information, you now have some background, actually some “futureground” (future accomplishments) of the man who wrote “Platoon Leader.” What you’ll watch in the movie and read in this and his other books you’ll hopefully realize is from the gifted pen of a highly-qualified scholar-athlete described as a by-the-book military intellectual who, as a voracious reader, immerses himself in all tasks he undertakes. I believe you’ll find he definitely proves it in “Platoon Leader.”
Bottom-line: I highly recommend this outstanding movie! And get the book, too!!
Of possible interest:
Strategy Pure and Simple: Essential Moves for Winning in Competition and Cooperation
and
George Washington's Liberty Key: Mount Vernon's Bastille Key – the Mystery and Magic of Its Body, Mind, and Soul
, a best-seller at Mount Vernon. “Character is Key for Liberty!”
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