Every great war story has a number of characters who represent some version of the “common soldier.” Just think of Forrest Gump’s friends, with names like Tex, Cleveland, and Dallas. They are the “regular folks” who constitute an army. These soldiers come from myriad backgrounds, but are unified by their work together on (and off) the battlefield fighting for a united cause. Authors, screenwriters, and directors showcase these soldiers in different ways depending on story’s message, mood, tone and context. Two war films, John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) explore the tales of common soldiers through similar but distinctive methods.

Most soldiers lead comparably methodical lives: performing regimented tasks, taking orders from superiors, and receiving limited amounts of time for free thought and exploration. The idea of the common soldier is not actually one single type of soldier, but rather an amalgam of several types of soldiers, which in the aggregate comprise the majority of the army populations.

The film adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel of the same name offers generic identities for the soldier-characters like The Loud Soldier (Bill Mauldin) and The Tall Soldier (John Dierkes). This tactic produces a sense of homogeneity among the battalion, implying that each character is anonymous and universally applicable. It is also Crane’s way of subverting the way military training ignores the individuality of a person and emphasizes structure and discipline over individuation. Despite the use of nondescript names, the story humanizes the soldiers through their distinctive actions and personalities. As a result, The Red Bad of Courage highlights the tension within the army between the notion of the “generic” soldier pressured to conform or “fall in line” and the actual person wearing the uniform.

In Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage, the characters’ identities are nonspecific but reflect images of difference. These soldiers fight together, but they have different beliefs, different tolerances, and different backgrounds. They are merely “common” in the sense that they all serve as Union soldiers in the American Civil War, no matter how strongly wartime efforts value them as numbers on a battlefield. The Tall Soldier, Jim Conklin, is uniquely different from The Youth (Audie Murphy) or The Loud Soldier as he is older and his attitude and personality represent that truth. The Loud Soldier serves as a good friend to The Youth and pretends to be more courageous that he is, while The Youth experiences an emotional and mental transformation over the course of the story. The introduction of the film tells us that The Red Badge of Courage is the story of The Youth becoming a man. Immediately, that suggests this is not truly a story about a common, mass-produced soldier, but the personal tale of a unique character.

Similarly, Platoon is a film driven almost as much by the characters’ personalities and struggles with each other as about the Vietnam War itself. Platoon is the story of a band of soldiers and a few sergeants, mainly concentrated on Charlie Sheen’s character Chris Taylor. Like The Youth in Red Badge of Courage, Taylor is initially afraid of and repulsed by his duties in Vietnam despite having left college to voluntarily enlist. He joined the fight without really knowing why, simply feeling a blind duty to his country that he couldn’t quite explain. Most of his platoon mates thought he was insane for giving up a free pass and risking death without having a good reason, and so Taylor’s journey throughout the film tells the story of a man coming to terms with himself while facing life and death. Over time, his interactions with the war, his fellow platoon mates, and his superiors mold him into a rich and complicated character.

Being a regular infantry soldier, the common soldier has to take orders from someone. Soldiers obey their superiors out of respect, out of fear, out of obligation, and/or out of friendship. The Red Badge of Courage explores soldiers who lack a distinct connection with their superiors, where Platoon depicts a group dramatically influenced by its polarizing leaders, and the identities and segregation that forms as soldiers fall on different ends of the spectrum.

In The Red Badge of Courage, Huston gives us only minimal insight into the personalities of the soldiers’ superiors. The Youth and his comrades’ direct superior is named, not surprisingly, The Lieutenant (Douglas Dick), who is a man fighting to keep his troops from running away during skirmishes. During the first main battle, The Youth manages to run away; later, we find out that The Loud Soldier did the same. The ones who stayed to fight did not stay because of loyalty to their superior but to win the battle, but out of fear for what would happen if they fled. The soldiers’ interactions with their superiors are primarily a controller-controlled relationship, which colors the attitudes of the soldiers in a way alternate to Platoon.

In Platoon, once Chris Taylor proves himself to his platoon mates in Vietnam, he builds friendships with his two commanders, Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) and Staff Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger). Both commanders are experienced combat fighters who have been affected by the horrors of war in dramatically different ways. Most of Taylors’ decisions are inspired by one of these two men, who serve as foils to one another, each contributing to Taylor’s confused and conflicted emotional state as he oscillates betwe emulating each figure and gauges the response. Elias is a caring leader, ethical and idealistic, often representing a paternal-like figure. By contrast, Barnes is hard-headed and brutal. Taylor follows orders based on his pendulum-like affection for these father figures, each of their influences seen through Taylor’s actions. We see his character run the gamut of behavior, battling an internal struggle between the idea of a hard-boiled soldier and a sensitive human being—a struggle that mirrors the dichotomous personalities of his two leaders. Taylor’s relationships and subsequent obedience to his commanders comes more out of adoration for them than his loyalty to the mission or the army.

While “common soldiers” represent various types of people, they are nonetheless distinguishable from on another, and these films set out to remind us that the nameless faces who are sent to the hell of war are the same as us, simple people trying to cope with an intense reality. The common soldier is relatable and authentic, genuine and approachable. They could be any of us and, in some ways, embody aspects of us all.