Programs/Movies

This is a (somewhat) interesting thread. The History Channel is running
Tour
of Duty in the evenings. Although it presents a somewhat cleaned-up view
of
Vietnam, it is kind of engaging. The characters seem interesting, and at
least some of the fight sequences are realistic. I saw one last night
where
the platoon was deployed split between two locations 12 km apart, and
one
half was being overrun. They ran short on ammo and had to let the enemy
get
amidst their positions in order to get weapons/ammo. It also showed
underage
soldiers, a not uncommon thing	in any war(my own Grandfather enlisted
when
he was 16 to fight in WWI by lying about his age).

Someone said they hadn't seen Sharpe's Waterloo. It was pretty good. The
fighting around Quatre-Bras at the farmhouse was interestingly done. As
was
(I think) the deployment of (I hope I get this right) a British unit on
the
fore part of a hill (allowing the French Great Battery to maul it). But
it
tracked Sharpe's progress through the battle. You see a few beloved
characters die fighting. It wasn't too badly done at all (but then, I'm
not
wise in the ways of Waterloo...). 

It would be interesting to see a film made (like Aliens) that was just a
"war movie" set in a sci-fi background - one that didn't focus on the
gee-whiz gizmos or the Force. Just a movie that focused on the "eternal"
facts of combat - the men, their lives, and maybe some of the battles
they
fought. It'd be expensive to do right. But one can only watch so many
Star
Trek battles (give me a single M-16A2 and a few mags and I'd clear the
bridge of any starship against those phaser toting clowns...) before
becoming kind of disheartened with sci-fi ground/boarding combat. B5 was
better, but still ended up being less than perfect. Their redemption lay
in
the addition of the phrase "Narn Bat Squad" to our collective
vocabulary. 

And if Jon ever manages to convince a major Hollywood studio to make a
film
about the GZGverse, I'm sure he'd have plenty of technical advisors...
;) 

Thomas Barclay
Software UberMensch
xwave solutions
(613) 831-2018 x 3008