Something that’s not been mentioned so far about the boot camp experience is the unit cohesion. Yeah, they train for physical and mental toughness, and weapons proficiency, but when the shit hits the fan, you need to trust in the guys on both sides of you to hold the line. Hartman didn’t want to read Pyles name in the casualty reports, but he also didn’t want to read anybody elses. I went through namby pamby Air Force peace time boot, but if I’d been going to combat, I’d have wanted someone like that barking up our asses. At least looking back, not sure if I had that awareness when I was 18.
Having said that in my first couple of days of boot we were told, ‘we’re going to fuck with you, and you’re going to handle it, and if you can’t handle it we’re going to find out now instead of when other soldiers lives depend on you.’ By this criteria, Hartman failed. He failed to correctly judge how hard to push Pyle before washing him out. That may sound harsh, and I’m not saying anyone else could have done better, but war makes pretty harsh judgements on success and failure.
Yousee, I consider this the perfect ratio… fat asses subbing as live casualties… never leave someone behind.
Yousee, here I feel that no matter how much the Marines would like to disown Pyle, By the night of his graduation, He truly was a Marine. In a matter of fact Marine Way, he is the stuff of legends… That Marine stood tall and presented his Rifle for inspection… lock and load… before delivering a killshot to the Heart of his Instructor at 3 yards, from the hip. I think even Hartman would be boasting at the tables of Valhalla over that one.
Never know, when one (singular) fatass is going to haul two out after training.
I don’t know how much unit cohesion you can get when as soon as boot camp is older, each Marine is then sent off to a different unit to serve as a butt-monkey for more experienced troops. Cohesion is what they had in* Band of Brothers*, where an entire company trained together from day 1 and was sent to the line as a unit.
Every soldier, airman, marine, or seaman shares the common experience of basic training for their service. It’s a bond you share the second you join your unit.
As an ex- Marine, I can only take from the movies what I see as very different from reality.
In the movie “Platoon”, new Army replacements sent to Vietnam were put on point their first day in combat. They were used to trip booby traps and absorb the initial hit from an ambush.
When in Vietnam, new Marine replacements were put between the radioman and the Corpsman especially at night (the safest position) so they could learn, and get some first hand experience on patrols.
In many cases, the only factor that would save the entire patrol from an ambush, was the experience and skill of the man walking point. Not a place for a rookie.
Since Marines served in Vietnam for 13 months, and some units were in country for several years, eventually everyone in the unit would be a replacement. Unit cohesion was built by nurturing and training one Marine replacement at a time.
Consider that both sections of the movie end with the Marines facing down a desperate person with a rifle. Hartman only got himself killed, but Cowboy got himself and half the squad killed. (Marines have specialized in taking out snipers since the Banana Wars of the 1910’s, and should know not to make a frontal assault).
My dad tells of when he was in boot camp, during the last week when they were less severly supervised, he and a few guys were dogging off under the barracks building. They discovered some brown paper packages stuffed in the flooring joists: 30.06 rounds somebody had stuck there. So it’s conveivable that a recruit could get hold of stray ammunition.
Keep in mind that, after basic, they get shipped off for more advanced training (in 99% of the cases, it’s “0800 Infantry”), not straight to the front.
Basic Marine training… the history, traditions and what it means to be a US Marine, occurs in basic training. That training is what makes you a Marine for the rest of your life. For those who’ve gone through it, it’s a life changing experience.
Once you leave Basic, the rest is just instruction and training in your specialty, (0300 infantry MOS in the Marines).
I have a factual question - okay, this is in Vietnam, a draft war. Could you get washed out? I mean, if “can’t hack it” were an excuse nobody would get drafted into combat roles, right?
I remember getting an airport style search every time we left the range, and they did their best to make sure every round given to a recruit was either fired or accounted for. In any case, the rifles were locked with a cable through the magazine well every night. The night before our first live fire exercise, one of my DI’s told us, “And if you’re thinking of turning around on the firing line and popping me, go ahead. I’ll come back and haunt your ass. I’ll quarterdeck you in your dreams every night for the rest of your life!”
You never know. We had at least one guy in my platoon who was about the same build as Pyle, and he lost at least a hundred pounds and made it through. About a year later, another “fatbody” I went to high school with approached me on the street right after he got through boot and I literally did not recognize him. One thing that would have made the movie more realistic, but would have been hard to pull off, was to have D’Onofrio lose the weight over the course of filming, so he’d be normal weight by graduation. No way they’d graduate someone weighing that much.
I think the training is dehumanizing because combat is also dehumanizing. I also think that most people, unless they’re crazy like Pyle, will retain their personalities more or less intact. The training adds another dimension to one’s personality, one that can be called upon when the situation demands it. I went through USMC boot camp 23 years ago, and although I’m not physically what I used to be, I’m confident that I’m as mentally fit for combat as I was in Gulf War I. That kind of training is very difficult to undo.
Training is dehumanizing specifically to increase firing efficiency in combat.
Historically, most soldiers in war didn’t fire their weapons. S.L.A. Marshall’s studies are the most famous ones, but there’s a lot of other evidence that prior to modern training techniques soldiers in combat, even in mortal danger, simply would not pull the trigger and kill another human being, and in many cases would not only refuse to fire but would simply freeze in panic. A full 20% of U.S. soldiers serving in the Pacific admitted to doing nothing more in their first few engagements than actually, literally shitting their pants - that’s the admission rate, mind you. There are tales of dropped rifles at Civil War battlefields being found that were loaded six times or more and never fired.
The purpose of training as it’s currently done in modern Western armies is to drill the concept of killing into the recruit. And it’s wildly successful; fire rates are many times what they used to be.
The words “Ambush is killing, (or Ambush is murder) and killing is fun”, started our ambush training classes. Often when running long distances, every time our left foot hit the ground we would shout “kill”.
You could call it dehumanizing… or you could call it a method of facing what you are about to do before you are asked to do it… either way, it works.
That’s kind of unfair. 3 guys were killed by the sniper - Eightball, who got shot before they even knew there was a sniper, the guy who went out to retrieve Eightball against Cowboy’s orders, and Cowboy himself, who thought he was safe in cover, but wasn’t.
And Hartman didn’t save anybody. Nothing would have stopped Pyle from killing everyone in the barracks if he wanted to.
Sorry to be so slow in reply, but I don’t surf the Dope on the weekends.
I took your original comments to mean that everyone who graduates boot camp cannot be “objective” about their experiences, and that they become (mindlessly?) loyal to the service. Therefore, their boot camp stories & experiences would not be trustworthy.
But isn’t that a “catch-22”? The only way to “truly know & understand” about boot camp is to go through it, but then they become one with the borg, and hence not truly understanding what they just went through… see what I mean?
As far as undying loyalty goes, I remember hearing the cadence
“Boot Camp, Boot Camp, don’t be blue… my recruiter screwed me too!”
and lots of mumbled “Fuck this shit. I got xxx days and a wake up, and then they can kiss my ass!”
Of course, I was not a Marine. 
Pyle wasn’t going to shot anyone else and Hartman had it coming when he started shouting at a man who was clearly losing it.
But saying Hartman’s type of training didn’t save anyone is pretty ridiculous, the narrative doesn’t follow all his cadets. I don’t even recall Eightball at Parris Island.
I agree with this. You could analyze Full Metal Jacket all day, but some of it’s major themes are definitely what it means to be a killer, and how war and violence affect one’s psychology. There were plenty of people in the film who were portrayed as, to put it colloquially, nuts. The drill instructor was a little nuts, Animal mother was a little nuts, Pyle was a lot nuts, the gunner on the helicopter was a lot nuts. The film was, at least partially, about Joker retaining his sanity and humanity in a situation that can drive men crazy.
I always thought it was interesting that there were exactly three women portrayed in the film, two of them marking transitions between “acts” in a three-act movie and the last marking the end. The first two were prostitutes, the third was a very young sniper. And it’s implied that all three were “penetrated” by Joker in one figurative way or another.
Dunno what it means, though.
I was commenting on the point that I thought Slithy Tove was making - that Hartman performed “better” than Cowboy when facing a desperate person with a rifle. I was just saying that in that particular situation, Hartman didn’t save anyone’s life - he did nothing to prevent Pyle from shooting up the barracks if he chose. I was making no statement whatsoever about the rest of Hartman’s training methods.
Yeah, that “one motivated person with a rifle” theme comes up a couple of times. As foreshadowing when Hartman lectures them about Lee Harvey Oswald. Then when Pyle kills Hartman. And then when the whole platoon gets shot up by one sniper. And then when Joker kills the sniper.