Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:

I had the rare privilege of seeing Stanley Kubrick’s last war picture — an adaptation of Gustav Hasford novel’s The Short Timers, about his experiences during the war in Vietnam — with war specialist Samuel Fuller, shortly after the film came out. He didn’t much care for the picture, he said afterwards, because he didn’t much like films about training, and besides, this movie wasn’t antiwar enough for his taste; he thought it might even encourage some teenage boys to enlist in future wars. Of course, Fuller had extensive war experience and Kubrick had none, which might have also played some role in forming his bias.

But one thing in the film that he loved without qualification was the close-up of the wounded Vietcong sniper at the end while she’s begging for Joker (Matthew Modine) to finish her off —- above all, for the look of absolute hatred in her eyes. “How did Kubrick do that?” he said with admiration.

It’s a powerful scene in many ways. For one thing, it’s a moment when the Feminine Other that’s been haunting all the grunts throughout the picture is finally confronted head-on —- an obsession that comes to the fore repeatedly in the opening sequence in training camp. It also creates a truly upsetting rhyme effect with the closeup of the insanely grinning “Gomer Pyle” just before he shoots Sgt. Hartman at the end of that opening sequence — a rhyme conveyed almost subliminally through a hum on the soundtrack over both close-ups.