A number of people attempted to talk the director out of placing "Adagio for Strings" in Platoon, mostly because it already had a history of being used as score-like material in award-winning movies in the previous ten years, including The Elephant Man. Delerue was actively engaged in the project by that point, and he concurred that his original music would suffice better than the Barber piece; it could be applied in more varied nuances for similar scenes. Stone relented to the extent that he allowed the composer to write an alternative that he could compare to Barber's music, though Delerue really never stood a chance. The "Adagio for Strings" piece is among the most yearningly depressing but beautiful compositions of its kind, and, in retrospect, it was always going to prevail for Stone. Its use in the film for the opening and closing scenes, as well as transitional landscape shots, the burning village scene, and the famous death of Elias (Dafoe) sequence, is legendary for its effectiveness in contrasting beauty against chaos. The piece easily overcame any previous associations and will now forever be associated with Platoon because of that tremendous impact. Delerue was well aware of this issue and addressed all of those scenes in his score with a very similar string-dominated theme that goes so far as to borrow significantly from certain progressions in the Barber piece. His lengthier renditions of this theme even follow the exact ascending structure and crescendo as Barber had, building to excruciating heights on violins at the same times. Descending counterpoint lines match the Barber composition as well, with a few bars late in the theme almost interchangeable. One must commend Delerue for bending to the desires of the director to the extent that he did, for his theme for Platoon is clearly a very classy rearrangement of Barber with just a touch of the composer's own harp and other techniques added. One could argue that the two alternatives would have functioned just as well in the picture, though as much as Delerue enthusiasts may not want to admit it, "Adagio for Strings" remains the greater gut punch. While most listeners remember the soundtrack solely for "Adagio for Strings," Delerue's score wasn't entirely rejected. He also conducted the Barber piece himself with the same Vancouver ensemble at Stone's urging, so his touch is reflected in the drama of its appeal. Pieces of Delerue's own theme did make it into the film, most memorably the short "Base Camp" cue.

Despite the score's status as a rejected work, the composer's suspense material was largely utilized in Platoon, lending often sparse but appropriately tense ambience to the horror of the stalking and quiet killing scenes. In these cues, the composer often applies high string sustains colored by exotic bass flutes and shakuhachi accents, though it's his precise use of high-toned Chinese wood blocks that really stands out in these cues. These wet wood block sounds may not evolve in any way during the score, but they do provide the jungles with an almost animalistic element, as though the score is part insect and part bird. Grim versions of this material with lower string emphasis provide gravity to the two most pivotal shooting scenes ("Barnes Schoots Elias" and "Killing Barnes"). Outright fright stingers also exist in Delerue's score, the outsets of "Bunker to Village" and "The Turning Point" using the dissonance of shrieking violins and flutes to denote sudden terror. The rest of Delerue's score is occupied by fainter versions of his main theme, as in "Grunts in the Rain" and "Carrying the Children." The incidental suspense cue "Enemy Prep" also cranks up the tension another notch with its expanded depth to the jungle material. Occasionally, as in this cue and "The Enemy Was in Us," a fluttering woodwind flourish provides a notable accent, and these are sadly too few in the score, yielding their role to the woodblocks. On the whole, Delerue's score does have an impact on the film in these parts and the few more dramatic moments where his music survives. It's a challenging listening experience, for his adagio equivalent theme is not as romantically appealing as his norm by design. Delerue refused opening titles credit after Stone applied the Barber piece all over the score, and he may have lost himself an Oscar win because of it. On album, the long-available commercial soundtrack included two cuts of "Adagio for Strings" (the opening with sound effects and the latter with Sheen's dialogue closing the story), one Delerue cue ("Barnes Shoots Elias"), and memorable songs from the film. In 1995, the Prometheus label combined the majority of Delerue's Platoon material with the longer of the two Barber recordings and the composer's music for the previous Stone collaboration, Salvador, and this product was re-mastered in 2006. An impressive 2018 Quartet Records expansion of only 1,000 copies on CD provides Delerue's full, 35-minute score with alternates, both Barber tracks, and the three relevant commercial album tracks, including sound effects and dialogue. This remastered presentation is definitive, offering Delerue's bittersweet but important contributions to this classic film in the best light.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download