This season, he offered a roster spot to the soldier, Brandon Guidry, who had been a medic with a scout-sniper platoon of the Fourth Battalion, 31st Infantry out of Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y.
Swofford remembers back to August 1990, when his unit -- the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, scout/snipers, of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines -- is put on standby for deployment to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein's forces rumbled into Kuwait.
Stone, director of films including "Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Snowden," and Scheer begin the conversation by discussing Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street," which takes a bold look at the rampant corporate greed on Wall Street in the 1980s.
Instead, he uses the platoon (the second of Battle Company, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) as a kind of laboratory to examine the human condition as it evolved under the extraordinary circumstances in which these soldiers fought and lived.
The men of 3 Platoon were among the first - they believe the first - into Basra, Iraq's second city and main port.
As a former platoon leader in the Third Brigade of the storied First Cavalry Division, I consider all those we lost over our 15-month deployment to Iraq: the 110 killed, and the 400 injured — a number that includes me.
As a former platoon leader in the Third Brigade of the storied First Cavalry Division, I consider all those we lost over our 15 month deployment to Iraq: the 110 killed, and the 400 injured -- a number that includes me.
The soldiers of Second Platoon were amongst the first people that Junger and Hetherington spoke to upon receiving the news of their Oscar nomination, and the filmmakers hope that some of the soldiers might be able to accompany them to the awards ceremony.
Christian Petersen from Kansas City, Mo., a machine-gunner from Charlie Company's First Squad, Second Platoon, was one of the first marines to approach the largest building last Sunday.
And, when the music lover graduated from Ben Shemen, he joined the first platoon of the Palmach Strike Force, a leading unit in the Jewish military.
The regiment was part of the platoon of the advance party that first entered Germantown before the battle became general.
