Hamburger Hill is a 1987 American war film about the actual assault of the U.S. Army's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division 'Screaming Eagles', on a well-fortified position, including trenchworks and bunkers, of the North Vietnamese Army on Ap Bia Mountain near the Laotian border.
This film provides examples of:
- Armor Is Useless
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: The repeated charges up the hill.
- Badass Creed: "Dont Mean Nothin"
- Battle in the Rain
- Big "NO!": Some soliders say this when their fellow soldiers die in battle.
- Bilingual Bonus Vietnamese: "Dinky Dao"
- California Doubling: the Phillipines standing in for Vietnam.
- Conscription: The draft, this being Vietnam and all.
- Death from Above: Helicopter air support. Trope name doubles as motto for the 101st Airborne.
- Did Not Do the Research: Averted. It received positive feedback from veterans for its authentic feel.
- Good-Looking Privates
- Hollywood Tactics: Foot soldiers assaulting a hill that holds little strategic worth, full of entrenched enemies. Tragic, but though it did in fact happen.
- Manly Tears
- Realising you survived Bash Brothers partnership.
- Shed over carnage of final scene.
- Me Love You Long Time
- New Meat: Follow experience of FNGs.
- Only a Flesh Wound Frantz's arm at the beginning.
- Scare 'Em Straight: When showing the fresh troops how silent and deadly the VC are, NVA, the instructor, specifically tells them to forget about "(Victor) Charlie" and worry about "Nathaniel Victor".
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Averted. The Animals' song "We Gotta Get out of This Place" used to great effect. Truth in Television
- Southern Fried Private: Well, technically Sgt. Worcester.
- Stern Teacher: Spc. Abraham Johnson. "Be an individual, and I'll be tagging your ugly toothless face straight to a long box with metal handles!"
- Straw Civilian: Inept, naive, or downright hostile.
- Stranger in a Familiar Land: Sgt. Worcester's monologue.
- Thousand Yard Stare: Several, in the aftermath of each of the eleven assaults up the hill. SGT Frantz gives one to Alphabet after the FNG's first battle, when the new meat looks for his sergeant's approval afterwards. "We got our cherries busted good today, didn't we?" Frantz's response, after giving the stare: "One of my people got killed. That's all that happened today." Also, At the end of the brutal fight up the hill, the three survivors all look back down at the charred, deforested hilltop littered with bodies from both sides with utterly empty, haunted expressions.
- True Companions
- The Vietnam War
- War Is Hell
- Was It Really Worth It?: The sign at the end.
- We Have Reserves
- Worthy Opponent: "Survive twice, and you will call him MR. Nathanial Victor"
- You Have Waited Long Enough: Breakup letter.
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