What If Full Metal Jacket Was The Only Thing You Knew About the Military?
How Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece got me all too ready for basic training.
I first watched Full Metal Jacket in high school, in 1999, as a way to school myself up on what basic training would be like.1 This was a time before reality TV shows about the military and the ability to “Google” anything you wanted to know. I was grasping at straws.
The films available for me to study were basically GI Jane (where Demi Moore shaves her head and goes through Navy SEAL training), Full Metal Jacket, The Siege, and A Few Good Men. I must’ve seen the training montages in GI Jane and Full Metal Jacket a thousand times each. These movies reinforced for me that the military was, well, hell—the weak get beaten, raped, or killed. If I wasn’t already filled with a weird admixture of desperation and ambition, these movies would’ve deterred me from joining up. Instead, they gave me a false certainty about what the military was like.
Private Pyle, the central figure in the first half of Full Metal Jacket, was a misfit lump of clay, a gentle soul that Marine Corps boot camp forged into a warrior. Yes, the process was painful, he murdered his drill instructor, and blew his brains out before graduating.
But the whole murder-suicide thing struck me as a metaphor for the possibility that the training itself really might kill you. What I most took away from Private Pyle’s experience was how fraught the dehumanizing process was for him compared to everyone else—because he was a fat kid with an addiction to food. That was the only part I could control, so I set out to control the hell out of it.
I started a workout regimen that bordered on psychopathy. I put myself through hell. I gave myself an eating disorder, reducing my diet down to 1,500 calories per day while working out multiple hours per day. It’s a miracle I survived my own stupid self-torture.
It was all super unhealthy and dramatic, but if you think you could actually die…it seemed reasonable at the time. That sounds dramatic, but I can’t adequately put to words the stew of dread, anxiety, and resignation that came with letting myself become part of a truly mysterious institution of warmaking. Some, like me, enlist because of the poverty draft; I simply had few other economic opportunities. Others, also like me, saw the military as the surest way to make yourself into man, whatever that meant. H.W. Brands nailed it when he called the military “that historic institution of elevation for the ambitious but badly born.” Appealing on multiple levels.
But based on what I saw in Full Metal Jacket, the risk remained that you might die. So when I showed up to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, I had reluctantly accepted that it might be the end for me. And if I hadn’t, I don’t know if I could’ve overcome the terror of getting on the bus to the recruiting station.
Once I was there, it sucked. The mind games were every bit as torturous as I’d gleaned from the movies. But the physical parts—while hard—were manageable. I had already done worse to myself than they would do (it was the Air Force, after all). I wouldn’t wish any of the experience on anyone, and I would never do it again, but it was a leap that changed my life.
I hadn’t thought about any of this stuff for 20 years, but it’s been swirling in my head ever since Lyle Jeremy Rubin and I sat down with the makers of Combat Obscura—Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman. We talk about Full Metal Jacket—a darkly comedic classic that has shades of an antiwar movie. Check out the episode:
Further Reading
Whistles From The Graveyard: My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan, by Miles Lagoze
The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
“Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” by Carol Cohn
Working-Class War, by Christian Appy
Teaser from the Episode
Full Metal Jacket Trailer
For anyone new to this newsletter, I feel compelled to affirm that I do not think as I once did and my entire purpose in life is to understand and undo the systems of death that I had been part of at various points in my life. One aspect of this newsletter involves me occasionally, bit by bit, confronting my past.