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Coming of Age in the 80s: When Team America Got Its Start
Heartbreak Ridge made Marines cool, fun, sexy and macho — Grenada was a cakewalk!
Bruce started watching Heartbreak Ridge (1986) the other day and I heard Clint Eastwood’s voice from the kitchen.
“Is that Heartbreak Ridge?” I said. “I love that movie!”
So I sat down and watched the second half of it.
And was transported back to the early 80s sitting in my dorm living room with my dorm-mates and some of our boyfriends.
“If they draft us, we’re going to Canada,” said one boy.
“I’ll fight,” said mine, all of age 20, in his deep, gravelly Kansas City drawl. He was 6'2" and weighed about 140 pounds, very like one of Clint Eastwood’s (aka Gunny Highway) Marines in Heartbreak Ridge. The future (never) draft dodger was more like big “Swede” whom Eastwood made short work of in a barracks brawl.
Bruce, ten years older than me, lost friends in a real war: Vietnam. His uncle did service in Korea, and was in combat like the real Heartbreak Ridge in one of our strangely forgotten major conflicts: Korea.
For those of us coming of age in the 80s, war was a movie and there were classic movies that influenced us all. First, the “Holy…
