This is a stupid question. He killed a defenseless woman, and put a gun to the head of a child.
I don't give a crap if he's a soldier with a mission. Anyone who does that is evil and has zero sympathy from me.

Well, Stone made the film so I guess his explanation must be accepted, however after the battle he wasn't crazy enough to not recognize Chris and demand a medic. Also he likely would've killed Chris in the hooch had Rah not intervened.

I agree 100%. Barnes was bad news and displayed classic characteristics of a psychopath imo. The way he killed the woman in the village and then disposed of Elias showed a total disregard for human life, he killed them without conscience.
Elias in particular had become a problem to him and when the opportunity presented itself to dispose of him he took it. Normal, rational people would never go as far as murdering someone like that regardless of what they had experienced. Elias was murdered in cold blood, plain and simple.
One of the most interesting scenes in the movie is the part where Chris sees Barnes looking sad and I think weeping after two guys get blown up, perhaps Barnes has seen too much death and is teetering on the brink. Maybe he knows he is not long for this world. I still maintain he was a bad egg to begin with though.
The part near the end where he appears to try and kill Chris is odd as on the commentary Oliver Stone said it was meant to show Barnes had gone crazy and didnt know what he was doing implying that he didnt recognize Chris as opposed to trying to kill him on purpose. Not sure I agree with that explanation.
Platoon is a great movie though.
It smells like a Spin Doctors concert in here.

He was a bad dude. He shot Elias and caused his death and remember at the end he tried to kill Chris too. Executes a defenseless woman and was ready to execute a child? War crimes 100%. He couldn't even use the Nuremburg Defense because it was all his idea.
Actually in the entire film you only see one confirmed kill by Barnes. He shot the guy running away from the village and that was in the back.

I think the war made him like that. There was one scene where he was staring in front of himself looking extremely sad and tired and it reminded me of a poem about how exhausting the devil must find it to have to be evil all the time.
Philip Caputo, writing about his own Vietnam experience, talked about the absence of civilisational aids there, without which the number of virtuous people would decline by about ninety-five per cent.
"Chicken soup - with a beep straw."

He was definitely wrong to summarily execute the woman in the village. Wartime did not give him the right to do that. Can you find some twisted way to defend what he did to Elias? He might have been a good man before the war, but wasn't a good man during the movie. He was rotten to the core. A mass of scar tissue with eyes.
I just read a couple other posts in here where people condone shooting the old woman in the village, saying that she was obviously VC, blah blah blah. The scene was obviously written to keep it ambiguous whether the villagers were actual VC, sympathizers, or being forced by the VC to comply. You have no proof and neither did Barnes. That kind of ***t actually went on in Viet Nam, and ***k you all for defending it. Anyone who defends it is scum.

To make matters worse, Barnes was brought up poor and uneducated in rural Tennessee according to the book. And if that was your background, being caring and compassionate usually applied only to the deeply religious.

Barnes was deranged, and was pleading Chris and the others to put him out of his misery when he gives his "I am reality" speech. He was suicidal.
~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.

Barnes was a hero and a villain.

I agree. Barnes is more of a casualty than a straight-up evil person. Still, I would count him on the side of evil though.
Welcome to my Nightmare- Freddy Krueger

Well, within the movie's context (active battlefield), he's more another war casualty himself.

• He's been there years already (worn down, physically and mentally)
• He's been wounded multiple times (several near death encounters MUST take a toll mentally)
• He was cracking up just before the village massacre (Charlie watching him mourning the booby trap victims)
• His sins really are going to extremes while carrying out his job:
  a) His shooting of the woman was not only because she was mouthing off, but to terrify the head honcho, he even states he's going to waste more of them if he doesn't talk, so clearly it wasn't just him lashing out in frustration.
  b) His shooting of Elias was in fact for challenging him in front of the suspected enemy and his troops, not out of fear of being court-martialled (the lieutenant being clearly on his side, there's effectively 0% chance of him doing time). Oliver Stone himself states Barnes' reason in the commentary when he fraggs Elias ("This is MY war"). He threatened to kill him at the brawl. He simply carried it out. Since on the battlefield Barnes has tactical command and thus authority over Elias, his fighting him there can be perceived (by Barnes) as insubordination. And insubordination in the battlefield is usually punished by death. That is how far gone (extreme) Barnes was at that point.
  Stone also says in the commentary that in the final battle, where Barnes lashes out at Taylor and almost kills him (the airstrike saving Taylor), he's out of his mind (berserk) and thus most likely does not recognize Taylor. So you cannot hold that against him.
  Even states that Taylor fragging him makes Taylor a murderer, and that will remain with him forever. he does not condone it as just (unlike a fragging of someone like say lieutenant Caley of the Mia Lay massacre, whom Stone states he would have happily fragged had the chance presented itself). Obviously he's not comparing Barnes to Caley.

I think that Barnes is a lot like
Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson's character)
in the movie
"A Few Good Men" (1992).
Like
Jessup
, Barnes has acquired the experience and skill to do his job competently, and has decided he's above the rules. He can do whatever he wants to get the job done. If he has to kill civilians or even his own men who get in his way, that's ok with him.
You got your mind right, Luke?

Every army needs a person like Barnes.
You might be right.
I wonder what Barnes was like before the war and how old he was.

This message has been deleted.

Barnes is the type of person Kurtz is talking about in AN. Get rid of the people who don't want to slaughter and kill like Defoe. Just give me Barnes types. Kill a ton of people and they will submit.
America didn't have the stomach for it. This wasn't like Korea where you have a real liberal government and a crazy nutjob being used as a middle man for Mao. We outright invaded a country that wanted to be our ally against the Chinese. All for money.

What do you expect to see from a man so long in fighting jungle (anti)guerrilla warfare?
Competance.
he was a real mofo out there.
And how did that all work out for the platoon Barnes was responsible for? Instead of a cohesive fighting unit, he had a demoralized bunch of individuals unbable to work together. As a platoon sergeant, his job is not to be some marvelous individual warrior, but a team leader and team builder. He's reponsible for the behavior, discipline, administration, and training of all the men in his platoon including his platoon officer. He singularly failed at all of these. If they're unmotivated and incompetent, it's his fault. Indeed, he worked hard throughoutr the film to keep them like that.
And no, the enemy, if they knew him at all, wouldn't fear him. He's a bully and a murderer and they were much better off with him in charge of that platoon than an competent soldier.

What do you expect to see from a man so long in fighting jungle (anti)guerrilla warfare? A musketeer with gentlemans code of conduct? Lol. Army needs soldiers who will do the job right and Barnes did every task given to him flawlessly. Not only he did the job flawlessly he was a real mofo out there. We can be hypocritical and judge him but we all know the enemy feared him with reason. The other pair of gloves are that later everybody are washing hands from a guy like that and judging him. He was surrounded with bunch of incompetent idiots and people absolutely not motivated for warfare nor life of a soldier. A platoon of men like Barnes and you can win any war you want. You know it and I know it.

Every army needs a person like Barnes.
Oh absolutely. There is nothing an army needs more than to have its morale ruined and its discipline undermined. A rabble that do not trust each other, will not follow their leaders, indeed would rather kill each other than the enemy can only be victorious when faced with an foe who is focused, well led, and disciplinedn

That reminds me of a quote I read from a personal narrative on a late war battle fought by the 101st ABD in the A-Shau Valley (The Battle of Firebase Ripcord 1970): one of the companies got a new officer to lead them. He happened to be a Veteran Special Forces NCO who was promoted to Leutenant just for the job. Still recovering from a leg wound he would, l limp around their position working on the defenses. He would tell them that, 'If you guys want to survive the war, you must only think of the war & nothing else.'
Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?

Every army needs a person like Barnes. We can all judge him but that is the fact which only few people are willing to admit.

That's a very good topic to think about.I believe that Stone wanted to draw a portrait of an evil person-product of the environment,as other users have already mentioned but,at the same time,we are presented with one of the most complex characters of the movie.This man is totally obsessed with pain and death.Even from the beginning of the film,when he shouts ''take the pain'' to a wounded troop,he seems like he is addressing to himself about something HE is battling for.Elias' rationality and kindness of thinking just block him and confuse him.(''When the machine break down,we break down'').But obsessions aside,he has not been able to cope with the idea of death.Nobody who has,would repeatedly beg for others to relief him of his existence.He is one of the most powerful characters I have seen in a war movie,although I,too,hated him,enough times.

My mom had explained to me that, to her, when you see Barnes "reflecting" after the men are injured, he is really reflecting on killing Manny, part of why he is startled when he catches Chris looking at him (they find Manny right after this). HE is the psychopath killer in this movie. He hates the enemy. He kills Manny in order to stir up the men and make them more ruthless. He wants to make them into killers like him. He wants to make them hate the enemy like he does. After he kills Manny and gives them the speech, many of them are ripe to "do the whole town". They don't question his tactics. He definitely goes over the top at this point. Killing the woman, and such. I had always thought this to be so. Everyone I tell this to thinks I am crazy. I just took my mother for her word.

Not sure about that last bit; As I recall Stone did multiple tours: As an MP; As an artilleryman & as a squaddie in the 25th Infantry division. I had heard that his 'Barnes/Elias Conflict' was him 'ruminating' what would happen if the squad leaders from his two different units 'had a fight'as for 'fragging'I'm sure it happened in the rear & it probably had more of a self preservation issue in the field-IE: Goof-off pointman, dangerously incompetent squadleader & whatnotstill the 'fragging' could be overstated sometimes:
I recall a 'poser/author' with the pen-name 'cincinatus'. He wrote about Vietnam a lot in the early 1970s & purported to have been 'in country'. He expounded a lot on 'fragging'-so much so, that he gave the impression that a large percentage of officer & NCO losses were caused by it. Part of what made me feel he was telling tall tales was the comments on the number of casualties that Helicopter pilots suffered. He 'opined' since most pilots were 'warrant
officers'
, the mechanics could easily sabotage the helicopter to do away with 'lifers'-kind of overlooking the fact that many warrants were barely out of high school & sort of 'hot rod racers' in their outlook rather than by the book officers

This message has been deleted.