Charlie Sheen wears a Timex Military

Oliver Stone wrote Platoon (1986) out of his own experience as an infantry volunteer in Vietnam, and the texture shows. Charlie Sheen plays Chris Taylor, a college student who gives up his deferment to enlist and arrives in-country with ideals the war steadily strips away. Stone won the Best Director Oscar, and the film took Best Picture.

Taylor's watch is a standard military-issue Timex, the cheap olive-drab field watch the U.S. forces bought by the crate. In the film he does not wear it on his wrist; it hangs from the collar of his fatigue shirt, visible in scene after scene. The piece has real provenance: Sheen, himself a watch collector, kept it and later consigned it to auction with a signed letter of authenticity, its band still caked with the dirt of the Philippine jungle that stood in for Vietnam, and its hands still set to the time of the film's final battle.