Jacob's Ladder (film) - Plot

Plot

Jacob Singer is a U.S. soldier deployed in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. The story begins in 1971 with helicopters seen flying overhead, carrying supplies in what can be inferred as preparation for an anticipated Viet Cong offensive. Without any warning, Jacob's unit comes under heavy fire. The soldiers try to take cover, but begin to exhibit strange behavior for no apparent reason. Jacob attempts to escape the unexplained insanity, only to be stabbed with a bayonet by an unseen attacker.

The film then shifts back and forth between Jacob's memories of Vietnam, as well as those of his late son Gabe (who was hit by a car and killed prior to the war) and ex-wife Sarah, to his present life (i.e. 1975) as a mailman living with a woman named Jezzie in Brooklyn, New York. During this period, Jacob faces several threats to his life and experiences grotesque hallucinations.

At a key moment, Jacob's friend and chiropractor Louis cites the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:

As the hallucinations become increasingly bizarre, Paul, one of his old Army friends, contacts Jacob to tell him about his hallucinations and is later killed when his car explodes. At the funeral, his surviving platoon-mates confess to Jacob they too have been seeing horrible hallucinations. Jacob is then approached by a man named Michael Newman, who claims to have been a chemist working with the Army's chemical warfare division in Saigon, where he worked on creating a drug that would increase aggression. The drug was code named "The Ladder" because it took people straight to their most primal urges. The drug was first tested on monkeys and then on a group of enemy POWs, with gruesome results. Later, small doses of "The Ladder" were secretly given to Jacob's battalion via their C-rations. Instead of targeting the enemy, however, the men in Jacob's unit attacked each other indiscriminately. This revelation insinuates that Jacob was stabbed by one of his fellow soldiers.

The last scenes have Jacob returning to the apartment building he once lived in with Sarah. He enters and begins looking through an old shoe box, containing his memories and the pain he’s been clinging to, things like his dog tags and a picture of Gabe. Jacob then is surprised to see Gabe at the foot of the stairwell. Gabe takes Jacob by the hand and together the two of them ascend the stairwell and disappear into a bright light. At the dénouement, we learn Jacob never made it out of Vietnam; his body is shown in an Army triage tent with two surgeons just after he expired, with a now peaceful look on his face. Apparently, the entire series of events was his dying hallucination. Before the film credits, an on-screen title card states that reports of BZ testing by the U.S. Army on its soldiers during the Vietnam War were denied by the Pentagon.