near the very end of the movie when they are doing the combat training where there are two teams the guy starts firing live rounds at Ferill, then Ferill gets up and shoots his friend in the eye with his blank gun.
1. why did he do this
2. if the gun had the protecter on it how did it manage to hurt someone.
PS. ive only seen bits and pieces of the movie so i may have missed something, if my question was already answered in the movie please understand.
1. He did it to injure Paxton enough so that he wouldn't be sent to Vietnam, in a manner that would like consistent with saying it was accidental.
2. I've used M-16's with live ammo, and M-16's with the "blanks". I never bothered to ask what the blanks were composed of, but was told that you were required to screw the device to the top to allow enough pressure for it to eject the spent shell casing. We were instructed to not fire our weapons during drills if the barrel was near someone. I suppose there's a certain amount of debris or force from the shot that could injure someone, but for the most part I'm not 100% sure how the blanks worked.
When you fire anything (blanks or bullets) there is a lot of gas and pressure released. It has to go somewhere. The safety caps are put there to expell the gas off to the sides. The reason they go to the sides and not the front is because anything in the barrel will be released at bullet speed. I'll refer you to the shell cassing that became lodged in a baretta and became a small projectile that killed Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow.
The gas/pressure burnt Paxton in the face. Imagine a small fire being aimed right at him.
Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, Darwin, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it
I thought that Brandon Lee was killed by a piece of jammed shell-casing fired by a blank from a revolver (Magnum). Anyway, safety caps, to my knowledge, are used to give enough gas-pressure to push the bolt back to enable succeeding shots without having to manually load the next bullet, only used in (semi-)automatic weapons, and only when using blanks. That a safety cap serves the purpose of preventing the firing of unwanted particles is not the sole purpose, if any. Smaller weapons, without a gas tube, don't even have safety caps when firing blanks and they offer the same amount of potential danger while they are mostly used at close range.
But maybe I'm wrong or incomplete?
1) But why did Bozz choose this time to injure Paxton, when Wilson was pointing his M16, threatens to shoot Bozz?
2) In this case, shouldn't Bozz be detained under court-martial for intentional misfire and causing injury to his mate? He was sent to Vietnam instead. Why?
Thank you.
Whats intentional about it? Ok, it is intentional, but its made to look like an accident. They all think it was an accident, so no court martial.
[Insert witty, humerous or topical remark or comment here]
Quote "In this case, shouldn't Bozz be detained under court-martial for intentional misfire and causing injury to his mate? He was sent to Vietnam instead. Why?"
To paraphrase Arlo Guthrie in "Alice's Restaraunt"
I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy.
A bullet is a tiny piece of lead. The shell casing contains the propellant (for lack of a better term) and a blank is just a shell casing with no projectile. The weapon still fires the same way, the same amount of pressure, and anything inside the barrel would exit at a very high velocity- hence the protector at the end. Bozz burnt his friend's eye with the muzzle flash created by the heat and pressured gas from the blank.
share1) To injure him so that he would be discharged and not sent to/killed in Vietnam. That's why Paxton thanked him for saving his life at the end.
2) Blank rounds are fixed to the shell, the end is crimped together and when fired it break open with small pieces of metal exiting the end of the barrel.
During basic training in the British Army this was demonstrated by placing a plastic bottle over the end of the barrel then firing off a blank round - it disintegrated into nothing.
In reality Paxton would have probably lost at least one eye.
1. Yeah, but still, why at this very moment? I mean, there's a lunatic running at you with a loaded weapon, you know it's live rounds, yet what you think at that moment is to injure/save your friend? That seems hardly plausible. What am i missing? Was it acceptance of being killed by Wilson and an attempt to quickly save a friend before dying? Maybe, but that too seems like stretch... I just don't get it and i think the scene was poorly done.
Also, wasn't it kinda an anticlimactic movie/ending? So much drama and its just like ground training? All that would have made more sense in Nam, the erratic, anti-social and frankly psychopathic behavior some displayed. I don't know what good you are for if you snap like that during training in your home country. What gives.
At last, i think its kind of a weak move to fake injury/help your friend so close to the end. I mean after all that time, all the suffering, blood and sweat you shared, you just gonna leave your brothers in arms go to Nam on their own, fight your war for you because you were too cowardly? Don't get me wrong, i'm completely anti-war, anti-gun and anti-violence, but i'm pro mutual aid, pro following stuff through and pro keeping your word, so there's no way i would have tried to escape my responsibility so close to the end, and even more so after getting to know all the guys. So yeah.
Now all that being said, i'm aware i've never known war even from far away, so i'm not gonna pretend i know what they are going through. Nonetheless, those are my feelings watching this.
6/10.
People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefsī²