I didn’t feel a lot of continuity in the movie at all - not just between boot camp and what followed, but between any of the scenes. My take on it was that Kubrick was just portraying the war as it might seem to those who were there. I’m sure a lot of soldiers felt disoriented and probably didn’t feel like events were proceeding in any kind of orderly way. I thought he was just trying to capture the insanity of war.
I agree with MGibson. My feeling from that scene was that killing her was the only humane thing to do. It was obvious that the girl was in agony. I thought the fact that Joker was the only one willing to do it actually showed his humanity in wanting to end her suffering.
The only way to describe the connection for me is to remember all the remarks and comments people I know have made about FMJ. So many remember the training. Friends, family, whatever…all remember the training, the sarge, the remarks, the killing of the sarge, but there is always less dialogue about the war scenes. The war is less comfortable, and people don’t talk about it as much. No more can we laugh about these characters. It’s not funny. Funny things are said by Joker (I wanted to meet exotic people, and kill them), but it’s not funny.
It’s fairly obvious that from the haircuts through the end of training, one was left to understand that the Marines made people into killers, and did not apologize for it…and can only be validated by jumping ahead to war. Graduation and all the logistics and transportation to the front were irrelevant. It’s best to jump from training to Vietnam.
Marines make killers, no apologies: Charles Whitman, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pyle, etc. After training, you knew that.
Marines equals brotherhood: Maggots, Maggots, Maggots until they graduate. Now they are a brotherhood of killers. They reached a goal they didn’t know they were going afer.