A U.S. Army infantry platoon under Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson spends six weeks in combat near the Cambodian border in 1966, filmed by Pierre Schoendoerffer, a French director who had covered his own country's war in Indochina a decade earlier. The camera stays close to the daily routine of patrol, ambush, and waiting: soldiers writing letters, listening to radio broadcasts from home, joking between firefights, and burying the dead when the joking stops. Schoendoerffer's own experience as a soldier shows in what he chooses to film, less interested in strategy or politics than in how young men from different American backgrounds hold together under fire. There is no narration imposing a verdict on the war; the platoon's casualties and small routines carry the argument themselves. The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, an unusual honor for a work made by a foreign filmmaker embedded with someone else's army.