so realistic in portraying small town Pennsylvania. The acting was superb.

Set aside for the moment that there's no evidence that there was any enterprise in Vietnam in which people played Russian Roulette for money.

Ex-military myself, I just can't get past the fact that Robert Di Niro's character was allowed to walk around in uniform while wearing a full beard. Sooner or later, a fellow service member would have told him to either shave the beard or take off the uniform.

Were there any fellow service members in that small town who weren't his friends?

And that's the way it should be.

There are times when I ignore certain inaccuracies about a film's portrayal of the military. And other times when it tends to intrude on the storytelling; at least for me.

Another good example of that is in Die Hard II, when the military guys are running around shouting tough-guy dialogue as if they'd never been in the service. One guy said to the officer in charge: "Pentagon briefing room on the phone, SIR!" I couldn't help rolling my eyes. In a unit that small and tightly-knit, there would have been no parade ground etiquette like that, no staccato, shouted military lingo. Just practical, workaday exchanges that got the job done with a minimum of fuss.

I spent my first year on active duty as a tank crewman in the Army working as a radio operator for Battalion Operations. If I had gone around shouting 'SIR-this' and 'SIR-that', I would have been laughed out of the Ops tent.