Came home last night to find my 18 year old son and a few of his friends watching FMJ. One of the girls asked what was accurate and what was not. I responded by saying the portrayal of mid-60’s Marine Boot Camp was, for the most part, pretty accurate. The most significant exception being a recruit being able to leave a range with live ammo (all but impossible).
When the scenes move to Vietnam, I commented that the actors had way too much hair. And the officer who was berating the Marine/journalist for the peace symbol on his uniform looked and conducted himself like a buffoon, like no Marine I ever met.
So, why did Stanley Kubrick make such a stark departure from accuracy when it came to these particular in-country scenes of the movie? It seemed inconsistent with much of the rest of the movie. I understand the aforementioned boot camp inconsistency as it added some flavor to boot camp, but the totally nonsensical portrayal of the officer doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the movie. I never thought of the film as the traditional anti-war flick making its point by portraying military “brass” as being incompetent.
The movie is based on the novel “The Short-Timers” by Gustav Hasford, who was a Marine who served in Vietnam. IIRC, the poge Colonel dialog is reasonably faithful to the novel (though there’s nothing about “The Duality of Man - The Jungian thing SIR!!!”), so you’d have to ask Hasford.
BTW, the whole novel is online at here, at Hasford’s website. It’s owned by his cousin, and appears to have a lot of his stuff online, so I’m assuming there’s no copyright violations.
I remember seeing the film when it was released, while I was in the military.
My brother was watching it with me and he asked “Is it really like that?”
“Yep.”
“That sucks!”
The part that I never understood was a moment in the film where all of the guys were in the barracks marching in their underwear chanting “This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.” as they grabbed their crotches for the “gun” and “fun” part.
It is entertaining, but doesn’t seem to have a purpose.
Everything we did in boot camp had a purpose—some times to teach, other times to punish, but always there was a reason. This scene seemed gratuitous. It didn’t look annoying enough to be punishment (so we march… we do that all the time).
It’s my understanding that the point of the movie, particularly the first half, was to highlight how military training systematically removes one’s humanity, hence the aforementioned scenes along with other seemingly gratuitous scenes like “You know where Oswald learned to shoot? IN THE MARINES!” and “What makes the grass grow?” “Blood! Blood! Blood!” Absolute accuracy was not really Kubrick’s main focus.
Probably some poor dumb sonofabitch recruit accidentally refered to his bullet-shooty-thing as a “gun” and the drill seargant decided everyone needed another lesson.
R. Lee Emery was brought in as a consultant for the first part of the movie, and he tried to insure that they did things accurately. He originally was not supposed to play the drill sergeant, but he kept begging Kubrick for the part. At one point Emery chewed out Kubrick for something like a half hour straight without ever repeating himself, which impressed Kubrick enough to give him the part (or so the story goes).
They didn’t make this up for the movie. One of my co-workers was in Vietnam and he did this in boot camp. As I understand it, the purpose of it was to teach recruits to use the correct name for things to avoid confusion and misunderstandings on the battlefield.
What’s the lesson? Is that like in Scent of a Woman when Al Pacino chides Chris O’Donnell for saying gun instead of piece or weapon? But what’s wrong with that?
Hasford was a Marine journalist. He never did any actual fighting in Nam, just covered the troops.
He died a number of years ago so you’re not going to get many answers out of him.
I was at a writer’s workshop with him after he returned. Interesting guy but with an ego that stood out even among a group of writers. (That’s 11 on a scale of 10.) To be honest, I never expected a book as good as the Short-Timers from him. I think it was the book that always inside him without his understanding what he wanted from writing.
Confusion on the battlefield is to be avoided at all costs, so you must have a common, known, set of words to refer to things.
If you’re a Marine;
The soft fabric thing you wear on your head is not a hat, it’s a cover.
The surface under your feet is not the ground, it’s the deck.
The detachable thing that holds the ammo for your weapon is not a clip, it’s a magazine.
The place you shit isn’t the bathroom, it’s the head.
(The last three as seen here ~2:30 when Pvt. Pyle shoots “Gunny” Hartman.)
I understand that the chant was supposed to teach the correct term for rifle.
However…
There were many many terms that were learned in boot camp, and there wasn’t a special chant for them. We didn’t have a special march and chant to remember to say “head.” This scene just looked silly and overblown for teaching the word “rifle”.
What was more likely was that if a recruit said the wrong term for “deck” he might be made to drop and do 20 on the spot.
When they wanted to teach us a lesson, pain was usually involved.
By the way, 20 pushups can be painful. When I was in Navy boot camp, several years after the Vietnam era, they were limited in the punishment they could give out. They carried a little card that told exactly how many pushups or situps or whatever they could make recruits do. The one thing the card didn’t specify was the duration of each pushup.
It was not unusual for the punisher to say “down…” and then wait a minute or so before saying “up,” carefully observing to make sure nobody touched their chest or belly to the ground. By doing this enough, 20 pushups could last an agonizing length of time.
I went through Parris Island in August-October 1966 and FMJ, with a couple of excptions, was spot on.
For one thing there would never have been only one DI present. We had 4 if I remember correctly. They had rotating days off so we usually had three present at any one time. The only time we had just one was at night when we were asleep.
The, “This is my rifle, this is my gun,” thing sounds reasonable though I don’t remember it ever happening to my platoon. It seems like the sort of thing a DI would do just because he could. Ermey said after FMJ, “To be a good DI you have to be half comedian.”
I’m going to drop over to Hasford’s site and check out the, “Short Timers.”
You do see some green belts in the background every once in a while. But generally speaking FMJ was even still accurate in 2000 when I went through PI. The key difference is that the Senior Drill Instructor wouldn’t be so prone to deliver the punishment, as his job is more to oversee and supervise the conduct of his greenbelts. The Kill Hat would be doing more of what GySgt Hartman did in the film. Oh SSgt Morgan, how I loathed thee.
Well… maybe. I can imagine him swiping one round at a time on visits to the ranges, assuming he had some place in the barracks to hide them, presumably this coming after he seemed to straighten up and was no longer treated to the toss-your-footlocker inspections.
Heck, he might have had only two rounds. It’s not like he needed more.
I am the proud owner of a rare R. Lee Ermey 12" autographed action figure, with which you can press a button on his back and it yells at you!
I’ve heard Sgt. Ermey in more than one interview say that he was a consultant for FMJ, but after hearing him Kubrick wanted him to do the role. I cant imagine Ermey begging for anything.
Ermey was excellent as a grieving parent in “Dead Man Walking”.
As for the war scenes, to me, its not a stretch to think that a CO would come down on a soldier with peace symbol on his helmet, especially during the Vietnam war.
As I understood it, a “gun” was a smoothbore (a musket) and a “rifle” had rifling in the barrel. If anyone mistakenly called their rifle a “gun”, all would be taught the same lesson. I knew this chant long before the movie came out.
