A portrait of men at war.
Lieutenant Joseph Anderson, a twenty-four-year-old, commands a platoon of thirty-three American soldiers fighting in South Vietnam. Twenty-eight of his men are conscripts. It is their first war.
For six weeks night and day a French film director Pierre Schoendoerffer lived with the Anderson platoon.
His film does not attempt to question the politics and strategy of the war in Vietnam, but concerns itself only with the human reactions of these soldiers.
Produced and narrated by Pierre Schoendoerffer for the French Television Service