Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Vincent D'Onofrio, Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, R. Lee Ermey, Arliss Howard
About three soldiers (including Cowboy and Eightball) are killed by the VC Sniper. Private Joker (Matthew Modine) and the others search a demolished building that they believe the sniper is in. Joker spots the sniper but his gun jams at the last minute. He avoids the sniper's bullets by hiding behind a post, before Private Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) saves his life, by shooting the sniper. The sniper is actually a female and starts asking the men to kill her. The last scene shows the surviving troops walking next to a flaming Hue City at night and singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.
Private Pyle
Continuity mistake: Pvt. Pyle is on the rifle range with Gunnery Sergeant Hartman right behind him. When filmed from Pyle's right side, he is wearing a white wrist wrap/brace but the shot moves behind him and it is gone. Back to the right side and it reappears. (00:35:50)
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: You had best un-fuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!
Trivia: R. Lee Ermey actually wrote all of Gunny Hartman's dialog himself. Ermey was involved in a serious car accident right before shooting, so Kubrick invited Ermey to come stay at his house in England to recover. While recovering Ermey read the script over and over, and he remarked that the Drill Instructor's dialog that was in the script was obviously the work of a screenwriter with a cliche imagination who obviously had no idea what boot camp was really like. So Kubrick allowed Ermey to re-write all of the dialog himself.
Question: Who's idea was it, or the reason, Kubrick decided to kill off Gunnery Sergeant Hartman? Was it to merely show the casualty of war?
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Answer: It was Gustav Hasford's idea. It happened in the original book that the story is based on, "The Short Timers."
Captain Defenestrator