“Nine National Guardsmen are on an overnight training exercise in the Louisiana bayous; when they reach a lake that isn't on their map, they appropriate the local Cajuns' canoes. One of them foolishly shoots blanks and the Cajuns return fire with real bullets, killing their sergeant; the war game turns real. As in his earlier Warriors, director Walter Hill uses the story of Xenophon, warriors in a hostile land trying to return home, to examine issues of survival. Although it is the Guardsman who are the interlopers, it is the Cajuns who are presented as the threatening ‘other' in the them-v.s.-us mentality that Hill evokes. However, in the ironically titled Southern Comfort, survival doesn't come from acting together as a group, but rather from relying on personal values and resources. The men are strangers from varying economic and social backgrounds; their common bond is their membership in the Guard. Faced with an unexpected real war, their responses vary--macho stances, ineptness, coolness, vengefulness--and one by one they are killed by the Cajuns and each other. Strangers in a strange place, who end up committing strange acts: this depiction of senseless war set in 1973 draws parallels to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.” Kathy Geritz