He didn't have Barnes to protect his ass anymore, but O'Neill was still very adept at doing what he needed to do to ensure his survival. However, he wasn't best pleased with being placed in charge of the platoon at the end, and under his cowardly command, I can't imagine many of his men survived.
shareNope, he definitely didn't make it out of Vietnam. I can always see his face when he is told he has to stay.
shareI love that part when he said “I don’t think I’m gonna make it” 😀
shareThe funny thing is, that's scene is *before* the big battle, which he manages to survive by hiding himself under a corpse, but after all that, he has the 'privilege' of being given charge of Barnes' squad and having to go through the same shit again (but worse, because now everyone's looking to him to give the orders).
shareHe probably didn’t have long left on his tour. Maybe he made it.
shareI like that it's left ambiguous.
He was a complete asshole (i.e. a coward and a buck-passer), and yet, he wasn't quite as bad as Barnes and some of Barnes' other lackeys (particularly Bunny and the rapist bumfluff guy), and part of me almost felt sorry for him. Out of all the 'bad' characters, he was the one I felt at least *some* sympathy for.
He was a pathetic figure that’s why he wasn’t seen as bad as the others. He was a sergeant and yet he was afraid of Bunny who was a private. In that scene where Bunny commits a clear war crime…O’Neil was unable to rein him in.
If he made it out…I wonder if by the end he learned a bit about himself and life so that when going back home he’d refrain from boasting about any “heroics” of his. Maybe not.
Precisely. He was a coward but he wasn't malicious, and in a world without the likes of Barnes or Bunny, his cowardice wouldn't have been a problem. Conversely, however, it's because of his cowardice that the likes of Barnes and Bunny are able to get away with the stuff they do in the first place.
Still, I mostly feel sorry for cowards. I think all of us can relate to fear/cowardice to some level, even if we all like to think we'd be better people than O'Neill was in his situation. But one can't feel bad or relate to malice and cruelty (unless one is a psychopath).
However, I do think you're right to imply that had he made it out of Nam alive, he'd be one of those bar-room boors bragging about his heroics.
I don't know if you've ever seen the show "The Walking Dead", but O'Neill reminds me a lot of the character, Gregory, played by Xander Berkeley. He wasn't particularly evil either, but he *was* a *real asshole*, and as Berkeley described him, the type who, during 'normal' times, would be an insufferable bar-room boor bigging up his 'achievements'.
Some nice thoughts here on Sgt. O'Neill. I had been thinking about doing a character study on him like we did with Lt. Wolfe, but i think you guys really pegged it here. Yeah, I don't think he was an evil person at all. We see his humanity at several points in the film and how fragile he is. He is a person much like Lt. Wolfe who is caught up in a horrible situation.
We see early on how Sgt. Elias views him just before the night ambush early in the film. We see him being very much a regular guy in the barracks scene during Lt. Wolfe's visit. While playing cards with Barnes and gang he does display a rather good sense of humor and human insight. As someone up above said, he did make a small effort at trying to get Bunny to move on before he did the awful war crime against the disabled man.
I think the scenes that i find most moving with O'Neill are just before the final battle. When he comes to tell King to pack up that he is out of there and if he is not on the chopper---then he will be. And the scene were he basically begs Barnes to ship him out for some RR does a lot to show how fragile a person he is. He has seen enough of the war and wants no more part of it. It is hard to not feel bad for him as well as the unlikeable Junior who has reached the same outlook. Both men have had enough.
I have a different take on the scene where O'Neill hides in the foxhole under the body of a dead young NVA soldier. I actually did not view that as cowardly but rather resourceful. It might have been helpful to have shown O'Neill more during the final battle (did they??) to see what his demeanor was during the fighting. His position was completely overrun by the 141st NVA and he would have faced certain death had he not tried to hide himself in the hole. He kept himself alive in a hopeless situation.
And as you guys point to----it is hard to forget the look on O'Neill's face the next morning when the Captain informs him that he has Barnes' old job. It is a weary look.
Great post.
I really appreciate your charitable take on the character, and I'm inclined to agree about his 'resourcefulness', although I feel that Oliver Stone intended us to take it as both resourceful (whatever else his faults, O'Neill was a smart pragmatist who, like you say, knew when a situation was hopeless) and cowardly.
I was anticipating much more antagonism towards his character when I started the thread, so I was sheepish about expressing my general sympathy for him. Once again, I don't think Stone invites us to like or admire the character whatsoever, but there *is* a pathos there, and he does merit pity, at the very least. And you're right about Junior too, who shares some of O'Neill's traits, and, once again, isn't quite as bad as most of the men in Barnes' 'team', so to speak.
It's ironic that when the guys were playing poker O'Neill said, "Sometimes I look at a guy and know, this guy's not gonna make it." Later he says that he himself is not gonna make it. But he does. It's good to be wrong sometimes.
shareO'Neill was weak, but he was pragmatic. The guys he was talking about, were weak *and* naive (i.e. dead meat).
But I wonder if he could afford to stay under the radar and survive, once he was put in charge of the platoon. He knew his limits. He knew he was a coward, and that he wasn't a leader, and that he'd so far stayed alive mostly by aligning himself with an authority figure (i.e. a bully like Barnes). In some ways, I respect his self-awareness.
I would imagine that O'Neill eventually got fragged by his own men. Someone tossed a grenade into his hooch late one night because he was getting too many of them killed. He survived, but it took both his legs. He went home and spent about 15 years with his parents collecting his pension and developing a heroin habit until they died, and then he became homeless and lived under a bridge in his hometown, where he was found frozen to death early one January morning in 1988.
shareThis is a very good thread, Harvey. Yeah, I think that many do not actually view O'Neill with so much contempt as they do pity. That is a good way that you put it. He was rather weak and pathetic but he does elicit some degree of empathy and understanding. He shows us his humanity and fear and vulnerability and his fragileness. He is not a horrible person. He is a lesser person caught up in a horrible situation. Much like Lt. Wolfe. They are the opposite of what Barnes was.
To answer the question of the thread---I probably do think that someone like O'Neill very well may have survived the war. He was like a cockroach in that he was likely able to survive and self-preserve himself. He would not have played the hero role and would not have Barnes' strong drive to meet the enemy. Maybe he got his RR and never came back and just made a run for it thinking it was better to be alive than blown to bits back in the jungle.
ccr---what you say sounds like The Purple Testament ep of The Twilight Zone when the one soldier knew who would die. O'Neill may well have died if not for his smarts to hide.
"He is not a horrible person. He is a lesser person caught up in a horrible situation. Much like Lt. Wolfe."
Very very true.
And these two characters in particular fascinate me, because they're basically the most 'grey' characters in the film, so to speak. Not in the sense that they're boring, but in the sense that they're the ones who sit roughly in the middle of the moral spectrum. Not decent and morally courageous enough to be heroes, but not cruel and malicious to be labelled true villains. They're compelling for many of us, because hopefully most of us recognise that we're *not* a Barnes or a Bunny. We wouldn't burn a village to make a point/out of spiteful vengeance, or shoot a cripple for fun. But it's hard for many of us to be certain that we wouldn't behave like an O'Neill or a Wolfe were we in such a situation, rather than, say, Chris, Rhah, or King, far less Elias. Would cowardice, ineptitude, weakness and eventual apathy get to us, despite our ostensible moral compass/absence of any psychopathic traits?
I think you're spot on. At root level O'Neill is a henchman, a toady who draws his arrogance from the stronger and more competent men he serves. Still, he's not quite as bad as some of the others who followed Barnes around, like Bunny or the southern yokel boy who carried the radio ("hey sarge, can we get in on this?"). An interesting nuance to O'Neill's character is that he's not sadistic like the other Barnes flunkies. He was clearly bothered by Bunny smashing apart the head of the young dead-eyed villager. He wasn't among the creeps raping the village women. He didn't join in the chorus to "do the whole village." Buried somewhere beneath O'Neill's sycophancy and cowardice was the flickering of a decent man who was sickened by the wanton violence, and not just because he didn't have the guts to kill indiscriminately.
shareBrilliantly put.
But can you remind me about the 'southern yokel boy'? I don't remember him.
I think one of the most abhorrent characters, possibly more so than even Barnes and Bunny, was the guy with bum-fluff who isn't one of the main characters, but who we see quite clearly as one of guys raping the female villagers during the raid on the village. There was a real callousness to his character, and a banality to his evil, in contrast to say Barnes and Bunny, who were both unhinged (Barnes partly because he'd been psychologically hardened and damaged by his experiences which rendered him unhinged, and Bunny because he no doubt arrived in Vietnam as a ready-made psychopath).
O'Neill is a somewhat banal type too (not in the writing or performing of his character, which is brilliant, but in the sense that he's basically an 'ordinary guy', rather than a more extreme/psychotic type), but thankfully he had limits. Whilst he was too weak and sycophantic towards Barnes to ever do anything courageous, despite his horror at everything he saw Barnes and his other lackeys do, he had enough decency to never get drawn in to being an active part of their cruelty (unlike so many of the other men who took Barnes' command as implicit permission to rape and abuse civillians).
I doubt he did...my reasoning is that, with him being elevated to 2nd Platoon Leader, he would have been forced to fight (not just giving orders, but having to fight). I think that's why he has that look on his face when Dale Dye's character tells him he's in charge...he knows he is a "dead man walking."
shareVery true, and on balance, your thoughts reflect my own. I just like the possibilty that he made it out alive (which would make him the only member of Barnes' 'bad crew' to do so).
shareIt's definitely open to interpretation. But the way the War was starting to go and with O'Neill being put in charge...I just don't think he would've made it.
shareBest case scenario: he went effectively AWOL during the next mission where he was put in charge, several men died as a result of a lack of leadership, and he was court-marshalled, but still managed to survive the war.
share