It’s been a while since I watched Hamburger Hill. In my teens, a lot of film and television were finally beginning to explore and talk about Vietnam and its effects on the servicemen who were in-country. I was reading books. I remember, vividly reading Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk, as well as the first time I saw Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.

Coming out at around the same time, was Hamburger Hill.

I saw this one in the base theater, and was gob-smacked by the brutality and the apparent futility of an Infantry Division of the 101st Airborne taking a hill in Vietnam. Over the course ten days, the squad attempts over and over again to take the hill in what ends up one of the bloodiest conflicts of the war.

And its depiction on screen is brutal and realistic.

I didn’t recognize any of the actors when I saw the film when it came out, but watching it now… well, there’s Dylan McDermott, Don Cheadle, Courtney B. Vance and Steven Weber. In fact it was Vance’s and McDermott’s feature film debut!

We are introduced to the life of the squad, and the film doesn’t pull it’s punches throwing you into the lingo and the attitudes of the time without explanation. You simply buckle up and hold on. But you get to learn about the men who fought this war.

Gritty, brutal, and heart-wrenching, the squad assaults the hill over and over again, only to be thrown back by the Viet Cong.

It’s a rough watch, not because it’s a bad film, but because it is intent on conveying the realism of combat, and the horror of the experience that these men went through.

Shot in the Philippines, the film looks and feels of the era it’s supposed to depict, and it all works incredibly well. The only thing I didn’t really care for was the score by Phillip Glass, specifically at the climax of the film. I didn’t think it worked, and it definitely didn’t seem to pair with the images we were seeing on the screen.

This one got a little lost in the shuffle coming between Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. One could argue Irvin’s directorial hand isn’t as strong as those of Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone, but it’s an incredibly solid, and brutal tale. It conveys the true horrors of war, the cost in lives, the effect this war had on those who fought it, and those who stayed at home, and the way it continues to haunt the psyche.

This one had more of an impact on me this time around than it did when I was younger, and Irvin gave us an underrated look at the Vietnam experience, and reminds all of us of the best and worst of humanity.