Full Metal Jacket has haunted the American psyche since it was first released in 1987. It suggested that Americans were once tough enough to endure the hell that was Marine training and the Vietnam War. Ostensibly a movie critical of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, it serves as a kind of “war porn.” The first half of the movie depicts Marine recruit training at Parris Island in graphic and gory detail. The lead character, nicknamed Joker in bootcamp, describes training as “an eight-week college for the phony-tough and the crazy-brave.” For nearly an hour, the movie depicts Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman pushing the platoon of trainees to their breaking point, or past their breaking point in the case of a recruit nicknamed Pyle. After Hartman’s brutal treatment, Pyle graduates from bootcamp. He was “born again hard,” according to the drill instructor – only he accomplishes his transformation into a Marine and a killer far too well. On graduation night, Pyle snaps, murders Hartman, and then commits suicide.
The rest of the movie follows Joker through the Tet Offensive in Hue—not that we ever watched it past the ending of the bootcamp scene, as I would discover after I joined the U.S. Army and finished with my own training as a combat engineer and in airborne school. In my own experience, it was Hartman’s cruel training methods and unapologetically crude language that made the movie resonate. Bootcamp in Full Metal Jacket was a safe way to learn that “war is the spectacle of the masculine bond.”
Despite this, Full Metal Jacket showed a version of Marine bootcamp that never truly was. In 1956, following the deaths of six recruits in a training accident at Parris Island, South Carolina in what came to be called the Ribbon Creek Incident, the Commandant of the Marine Corps condemned reckless training and “deplored the abuses that he said had crept into recruit training since World War II.” Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s casual physical violence and raving cruelty did not reflect how the Marine Corps wanted to train its recruits in 1956 or after. Even after the war, Hartman-style drill instruction was discouraged. By contrast, a 1982 front-page story on drill instructors in the Los Angeles Times described DI Gunnery Sergeant Jose A. Garci’s approach to instruction as treating even the most belligerent recruits “with the drill instructor’s leadership by example, with firmness and quiet control.”
