Plot
Specialist Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is an American soldier stationed in Germany in 1989. Bored with the lack of a war, he instead devotes his attention to black market deals, as well as cooking heroin for a gang of drug-dealing Military Police led by the psychotic Sergeant Saad. As a supply specialist, Elwood poses as a model soldier and friendly confidant to his incompetent commanding officer, Colonel Berman (Ed Harris), who gives Elwood the opportunity to turn Army protocol to his advantage. Berman has no idea what supplies his subordinate is requisitioning or that Elwood is sleeping with his wife (Elizabeth McGovern).
Elwood's company then gets a new First Sergeant, Robert E. Lee (Scott Glenn). This new Top is both menacing and savvy, quickly assessing that soldiers like Elwood are on engaged in graft. Meanwhile a tank crew, under the influence of Elwood's heroin, kill two soldiers in charge of a weapons convoy by crashing through a gas station. Elwood happens upon the cache and steals it, hiding the trucks in a missile base.
Lee confronts Elwood about his abuses, and when Elwood tries to bribe him, Lee revokes all of Elwood's privileges, destroys much of his property, and makes him share his room with a new, naive and deeply honest soldier, Pvt. Knoll (Gabriel Mann), who doesn't fit well with Elwood's lifestyle.
To get back at Lee, Elwood pursues the sergeant's daughter, Robyn (Anna Paquin), taking her out for the night and then deliberately having sex with her in his car outside her house, which Lee sees from his window. Though thinking he has won, the next morning Elwood finds his squad are doing weapons training, with Elwood's car used as target practice. Lee then leaves a hand grenade trap in a locker some soldiers have been using to hide heroin. The grenade explodes and kills one of Elwood's friends.
Elwood sells his hidden cache of weapons to a Turkish dealer nicknamed "The Turk" (Haluk Bilginer) who will only exchange them for a massive amount of opium. Elwood reluctantly accepts and plans to cook it into heroin. However, a fight between Saad and Knoll occurs, and Elwood is forced to save Knoll and recruit the pair as assistants into his plan to cook the opium. In order to have time to trade the weapons from the missile base and collect the drugs, Elwood sells out Colonel Berman, who is on an army exercise against another regiment. His unit's failure as part of the test ultimately leads to the colonel's dismissal. Berman, unaware that he has been betrayed, reflects ironically on this turn of events with Elwood.
While the opium is being cooked, Elwood sneaks to the base swimming pool to meet Robyn. Knoll then appears with Sgt Lee. Here it is revealed Knoll is actually a 2nd Lieutenant from the Inspector General's Office disguised as a junior soldier in order to investigate Elwood. Knoll puts Robyn in a car while Lee beats up Elwood. However, Robyn tells Knoll that her dad is going to kill Elwood, something Knoll - as an honest officer - cannot allow. Meanwhile commandos reporting to Knoll attempt to arrest Elwood's partners, but Saad, intoxicated by opium fumes, provokes a bloody gunfight that kills many of the fighters. Lee attempts to kill Elwood by throwing him out of a window but Knoll holds him at gunpoint. The building explodes from a gas explosion in the basement, caused by burning morphine and the firefight. Elwood wraps his handcuffs around Lee's neck and draws him out the window as Knoll is engulfed in flames. Elwood survives by landing on Lee.
The film concludes with heavy irony. The US Army decorates Elwood with medals (Lee receives a posthumous Silver Star) and transfers him to Hawaii, where his new CO is just as naive as Col. Berman. Elwood states that Robyn remains his sweetheart and that she will be visiting soon. The film ends with Elwood requesting excessive supplies, implying that he plans to sell them on the black market again.
Read more about this topic: Buffalo Soldiers (film)
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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