The Anderson Platoon

In the autumn of 1966, Pierre Schoendoerffer embedded himself with a thirty-three-man platoon in the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and lived with them for weeks. The platoon was led by Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson, twenty-four years old and a West Point graduate, a Black officer commanding an integrated unit. The documentary does not build combat into a narrative; it records the soldiers’ daily life, the waiting, the tedium, the fear and the violence that breaks out between them as they were. Schoendoerffer had served in the First Indochina War and saw Vietnam as its continuation, which shapes how he looks. The film was broadcast first on French television and then on CBS in America, and it won the Oscar for best documentary in 1968. It runs sixty-five minutes.