Full Metal Jacket

Gustav Hasford, Michael Herr, and Stanley Kubrick, 1987

#12 of 28 in the 20th century series

In the aftermath of World War II, historian S.L.A. Marshall released a book, Men Against Fire, that made the startling assertion that only a quarter of American troops engaged in active combat during that war ever actually fired their weapons. In recent years this claim has been widely disputed, but it greatly concerned military commanders as the U.S. escalated its involvement in the war in Vietnam. Especially once the draft was imposed and the new arrivals on military bases were not enthusiastic volunteers but reluctant conscripts, how could the top brass overcome these young men’s ingrained aversion to killing other human beings before shipping them out to a war zone? Full Metal Jacket shows us the answer. Most of this movie is set in Vietnam, but it is remembered much more for its first third, as a group of Marine recruits is trained on Parris Island. Even more specifically, Full Metal Jacket is remembered for the sequence, following an opening montage of varied ’60s hairstyles being reduced to uniform crew cuts, in which a drill instructor performs a shock and awe routine with his assembled trainees, subjecting them to a tour de force of breathtakingly inventive verbal abuse with a soupçon of violence thrown in. Having torn down whatever previous identities the recruits may have had (“You are not even human fucking beings!”) and overwritten them with his own (“From now on you’re Private Snowball!”), he spends the subsequent scenes filling up these emptied shells by redirecting the fundamental components of their psyches⁠—the sex drive, the search for the divine, the very sense of self⁠—into their new identities as single-minded killers. (“I love working for Uncle Sam / Lets me know just who I am!”) Ultimately, the big question is how well it works for our protagonist, Private Joker, whose self-description as a killer always comes with a sardonic edge. Will he really be able to pull a trigger? If so, under what circumstances?

My school is slated to spend the entire year in distance learning due to the pestilence that has descended upon the land, and to keep the childlings from having to spend seven consecutive hours on Zoom calls, we’re running a staggered schedule with three classes at a time, alternating month by month. That means that last week I got a new batch of 79 students. So it stands to reason that in watching Full Metal Jacket this time around, I was struck by the fact that the gunnery sergeant, whose title includes the word “instructor”, actually is a teacher of sorts. “You will learn by the numbers! I will teach you!” he bellows at a recruit he has just sucker-punched, and sure enough, I recognized the basic components of his instruction. He gives lessons, calling upon students who raise their hands (as in the infamous scene in which he extols the prowess of Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald); he leads exercises, more literally than I do; he also offers targeted feedback to correct errors he sees his charges making, as when he tells Joker, “Move the rifle around your head, not your head around the rifle.” That gave me a flash of recognition⁠—not for the subject matter, obviously, but just insofar as it felt like an authentic example of the sort of little tips that you give all the time as you’re monitoring student work. And he does succeed in getting his trainees up to speed on the material they have come to Parris Island to learn: military protocol, weapon maintenance, that sort of thing. Unlike tutoring, classroom instruction also requires a teacher to handle group dynamics, which the gunnery sergeant does after his own fashion. The shock and awe routine at the beginning is a ludicrously extreme illustration of the principle that you start off strict and get more lenient over time (which he does! as the sequence continues, we do eventually see him doling out praise!), since the other way doesn’t work. He deals with a potential rebel in the platoon, Joker, by co-opting him, giving him the responsibility to get the fuckup in the group up to speed. (Joker proves to have a different style, showing patience and calling the fuckup by his real name, Leonard, rather than the drill instructor’s nickname for him, Gomer Pyle.) And, in a move that would get a teacher at a reputable public school fired with a quickness, the drill instructor builds unit cohesion by turning Pyle into a common enemy, punishing the other recruits for Pyle’s mistakes and fostering resentment.

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This turns out to be a miscalculation, as Pyle’s psyche disintegrates even as the drill instructor begins to let up on the pressure, and the sequence concludes with Pyle shooting the drill instructor to death, then turning the gun on himself. In a sense, it’s the obvious ending, even the clichéd ending. But there’s another common narrative in which the troops develop a grudging respect for the hard-ass sergeant and realize that it was his methods that assured that they’d learn what they needed to learn to survive out “in the shit”. I mean, that’s the narrative that still holds in the actual military, given that the practices we see in the film continue into the present day: for instance, I remember walking across my local university campus and seeing an instructor leading an ROTC squad in the same sorts of chants. “We’re trained to kill and kill we will!” “What makes the grass grow? Blood, blood, blood!” Everyone who wants to make an anti-war movie has to contend with the likelihood that it will taken by some as a pro-war movie. Full Metal Jacket offers up enough satire, from the Orwellian rephrasings at the newspaper staff meeting to the lieutenant repeatedly smiling for photos at the edge of a mass grave, to make it obvious that we’re meant to find the war darkly absurd. And yet, to judge from the bottom half of the Internet, there are plenty of people who look at, say, the door gunner who cackles “Get some!!” as he mows down civilians from a helicopter for sport, and think he’s cool and funny. There may not have been anything Stanley Kubrick and company could do to keep a broad swath of the public from looking at the drill instructor⁠—the sort of man whose worldview threatened to wipe humankind from the face of the earth back in the Dr. Strangelove days, and continues to do so today⁠—and continuing to believe that we wanted him on that wall, we needed him on that wall, etc. But they could at least signal their position on the matter with a bullet to the chest.



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