Word: jarhead
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...first Gulf War, we sense chaos indirectly. We see bomb blasts reflected through windows; we watch smoke rise above the bodies of Iraqi civilians, recently burnt off-screen. This violence is filtered through the eyes of narrator Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the everyman U.S. Marine, or “jarhead,” whose war autobiography this movie adapts. While training, Swofford is selected to join an elite scout unit, and he trades in his girlfriend for a sniper rifle and Peter Sarsgaard, his increasingly unstable spotter. Sergeant Siek (Jamie Foxx) leads Swofford’s unit, and it?...
...indeed, that happens, more or less on schedule, in Sam Mendes's Jarhead, which is based on Anthony Swofford's best-selling memoir of his service in the 1991 Gulf War. There is, however, this important difference between this film and its predecessors: these guys never get to fire a shot. They are all dressed up in stifling combat gear but they have no place to go, except over the next berm (or dune) where they find nothing but more emptiness, more sand, which, if you want to get all fancy and symbolic about it, matches the emptiness inside them...
...them-if you define manhood in its most primitive form: as bonding on the basis of mutual sweating, swearing, swaggering under impossible conditions. But that, in its way, is the genius of this movie. Mendes, whose previous films (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) bear no resemblance to Jarhead, except in the well-calculated expertise of his direction-lots of handheld cameras in constant motion here-is totally non-judgmental, entirely unsentimental. Despite writing his book and seeing it made into this intense and absurdist movie, Swofford seems only to have taken one thing away from his experiences, which is that...
...rejoin the Marines. He was 30, married, a child on the way. "It was really hard on the family," McKechnie says. "Look at Jill. She's a New Yorker, a former model. She had married a hunky media executive, and all of a sudden she ends up with a jarhead on her hands. This is not what she signed...
Some observers in the military believe the nudity and sexual humiliations staged at Abu Ghraib are not all that different from the crude hazing and horseplay that are commonplace among servicemen. In his 2003 book Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, author and former Marine Anthony Swofford describes how his unit staged a "field f___," a simulated mass rape of one Marine by others, to let off steam and entertain a visiting journalist. Says Swofford of the scenes at Abu Ghraib: "We can be assured that somewhere on American military bases throughout the world...