The moral of the story
I understand there was a moral to the movie.
Zack Mayo (Richard Gere) is a cynical, hard-bitten, street-wise young man who has depended only upon himself for all of his life and has learned in the dangerous streets of Manila never to trust anyone. This might have served him well while growing up, but it won't do in the U.S. Navy where teamwork and mutual trust and support count for more than individual effort.
Zack Mayo attends the U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School in hopes of bettering his life, social status, and income. Nothing wrong with that. Service in the U.S. military is always honorable. But Zack figures on skating through OCS sheerly on his own efforts, the heck with everybody else.
So, how does one make the zebra change his stripes? How does one bring the camel to water and make it drink? The answer: A significant emotional experience, known by psychologists as a S.E.E.
It turns out that unbeknownst to Zack, Navy OCS is the S.E.E. that will alter Zack's heretofore, self-centered, cynical individualism and learn to emphathize with teamwork and dependance upon peers. In a more sentimental, nostalgic sense, Zack was emotionally dead before and now he's learned to 'feel' for his fellow human being again.
When human beings harbor deeply ingrained beliefs and prejudices, all the verbal talk is worthless. It takes a S.E.E. to persuade such a person otherwise.
(I can think of one example, illustrated in an old Korean War movie. A squad of G.I.s in Korea, circa, 1951, are all white except for a new squad member, an Afro-American. Most of the squad comes to accept the black soldier except for one holdout, a man from the south; wouldn't you know it? The prejudiced white soldier harbors his prejudice, even after getting slapped in the face by his squad leader after a brief skirmish with the North Koreans. But later in the movie, the southern G.I. is wounded and left out in the open with North Koreans still around. The black soldier risks his neck and carries the wounded southern soldier back to safety where he starts to treat the white soldier's wounds. He tells the white soldier that at this point the southerner doesn't mind having the black guy's hands on him. But it wasn't necessary. The wounded white soldier has experienced his S.E.E. He regrets his prejudice and tells the black soldier how much he appreciates him from now on.)