Pierre Schoendoerffer and Raoul Coutard met in Indochina, where both were combat photographers (Schoendoerffer was taken prisoner at Dien Bien Phu). Out of his Vietnam experiences came Schoendoerffer's novel and then film, The 317th Platoon; The Anderson Platoon followed in 1966. Set during the waning days of the French involvement in Southeast Asia, The 317th Platoon eschews Hollywood heroics to evoke the misery and senselessness of the war. The retreat of a platoon made up of French and Laotians is punctuated by ambushes and burials, and attacks on villages; the "enemy" is barely seen. The incessant rain, the pain of both soldiers and civilians and the impossibility of communicating any of it-these are the enemy. What plot there is focuses on the conflict between a career soldier and the young lieutenant in command-characters common enough in war pictures, and probably in war-nevertheless, this is a dramatically undramatized picture of the war (albeit from a French, not Vietnamese, point of view). The slow destruction of the group might stand in for the war's corrosive effect on all the societies (French, American, Vietnamese) which it touched.