Kiefer Sutherland wears a Seiko 6105

Rat Kiley is the one who tells the story. In A Soldier's Sweetheart, a 1998 television film drawn from Tim O'Brien's Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, Kiefer Sutherland plays Kiley, the platoon medic, narrating what happened when a young soldier flew his girlfriend out to a remote medical detachment in the highlands and slowly lost her to the war. O'Brien's story is one of the strangest things he ever wrote, and the film follows its arc: a sweet teenager from Ohio arrives in country and, over a few weeks, is pulled into the orbit of the Green Berets until she stops coming back.

On Kiley's wrist is a dark dive watch identified as a Seiko 6105. If it is, the prop department chose well, because the 6105 is about as period-correct as a Vietnam watch gets. Seiko built it from the late 1960s into the 1970s as an automatic diver rated to 150 meters, with a cushion-shaped case, a crown at four o'clock, a date window, and large luminous hands and markers. American servicemen bought Seiko divers in big numbers at post exchanges during the war, cheap and tough and waterproof, and the 6105 became so tied to that era that collectors simply call it the Vietnam Seiko. In the surviving frames Kiley's watch sits dark against dark fatigues, too shadowed to read a model off the case, so the identification rests on a single watch-spotting source rather than on the screen itself.