DRAWING FLAK FROM NORRIS

After watching “Platoon,” Chuck Norris wondered, whatever happened to heroics?

Although awed by the cinematography, impressed by the “superb” performances (“There’s just no doubt about that”), Norris said he’s not convinced that “Platoon” delivers a true depiction of what went on in Vietnam.

“Maybe it happened. But I don’t believe it worth a damn,” he said. “If I was a Vietnam vet who’d put my life on the line over there, and then went to see ‘Platoon’--with those scenes of G.I.’s tormenting villagers and raping young girls--I’d be furious.”

Remembering his younger brother Wieland, who died in Vietnam in June of 1970, Norris said, “In his letters he wrote about brotherhood and camaraderie. There wasn’t anything about the kind of stuff that went on in ‘Platoon.’ ”

And what about the real-life heroes of Vietnam? Branding the film “a slap in the face to all the Medal of Honor winners,” Norris asked rhetorically, “What about those guys? What about what they went through--the jeopardy they faced and the courage they showed? Why isn’t that up there on the screen?”

But the film doesn’t purport to tell every soldier’s story.

Countered Norris: “ ‘Platoon’ insinuates that it is about all platoons. Well, you can talk to a thousand veterans and a lot of them will say, ‘That’s not the way it was.’ ”

Norris, who leaves for the Philippines in one week to begin work on “Missing in Action III” (“I play a man who has a cause. He puts everything on the line for a cause. What’s wrong with that?”) worries that “Platoon” will “send us back to the negative movies with anti-heroes,” Norris also sees the film as propaganda fodder--”a field day”--for communist countries. “My God, it’s making us look like the bad guys, and the VC like the good guys.

“The thing is, there’s so damn much negativity in the world. We face it every friggin’ day. I don’t want to have to face that when I go to the movies.

“I mean, jeez, if you want all that realism, if you want to be depressed, you can watch the news at night.”