The film opens in the Vietnam war in 1968, specifically near Ca Lu. A US Marine platoon, led by Lieutenant Hays Hodges and Lieutenant Terry Childers are advancing through the jungle and they split up to take two different routes. However, Hodges' group is ambushed by North Vietnamese soldiers and all but Hodges are killed. At the same time, Childers' group captures the leader of the attackers, Colonel Binh Le Cao. Childers orders Colonel Cao to call his men off Hodges and advance. To try and intimidate him, Childers holds a pistol to Cao's unarmed radioman, promising to let them both go free if they cooperate. When Cao refuses to call his men off, Childers executes the radioman and turns the gun on Cao, who immediately radios his men and tells them to advance, leaving Hodges alive. Childers then keeps his word and lets Colonel Cao go.

The movie then jumps to 28 years later (1996), where Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), now a Colonel and a veteran, although he has been confined to a desk job for the last 28 years due to an injury picked up in Vietnam, is holding a retirement party. As a surprise, the now-Colonel Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) shows up to present Colonel Hodges with a sword of honour. Not long after this, Childers and his platoon are called into action in Yemen, where an unruly crowd of local men, women and children demonstrate outside the U.S. embassy in Sana'a which had been incited by jihad audio tapes and the U.S. Ambassador, Ambassador Mourain, his wife and young son need to be evacuated. During the evacuation, 3 Marines are killed by gunmen on the roofs of the buildings overlooking the embassy. After retrieving the U.S. flag and flying Mourain and his family out of the Embassy, Childers returns to aid his marines. A fourth Marine, Sergeant Kresovitch is mortally wounded and dies in Childers' arms. Childers, while peering around his cover, appears to see something in the crowd below. He immediately orders his men to open fire on the crowd, killing 83 men, women and children.READ MORE

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