Actor r lee ermey12/7/2023 Then there are the civilians in foreign countries where Marines brought death and destruction. I know others who didn’t come home at all. I have friends who came home grievously wounded in body, mind and spirit after being baited by the Gunny. It has been over 30 years since I first watched “Full Metal Jacket.” I understand and have written extensively about the complexities, tragedies and ecstasies of sending young people to war. I implicate myself in the sentimentality surrounding the Gunny. When I was 17, that made him easy to love and exalt because he handed us a romantic idea of what masculinity and warriorism looked like: Self-sacrifice, mission before man, victory at all costs - these were the slogans that effortlessly built the ranks of American ground-combat units and made it easy for our leaders to send young men and women to war. Flawed, certainly, but we liked our heroes flawed. The Gunny might have started as the villain who broke us down, but he became the hero who rebuilt us stronger than before. But now the man was home, with highlight reels and not much else. Imitations of the Gunny trained him and sent him off to fight. That kid who entered the gates was forever gone. Trying to regrow that slimy civilian skin that I was forced to shed at boot camp was difficult. It was rather useless stuff for the veteran trying to piece it all back together. It was suited, styled and forged for the young Marine going off to fight. We became the Gunny’s Marines, armored for war. It took 13 weeks to release us from the slimy civilian skins we’d arrived in. In our dreams, he performed the beautiful and erotic profane poetry of war-making: degradation, humiliation, death, rebirth. It was life imitating art.Īt night, as we lay in our barracks, the Gunny was there, too. Almost every line Ermey’s character said in his 40 minutes of screen time was recited and riffed on by my drill instructors. “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?” echoed across the depot day and night. I attended boot camp a year after the film’s release, and every drill instructor was performing the Gunny. Or if it did, it registered as a symptom of Pyle’s own ineptitude. I was 17, and Pyle’s act of murder and suicide barely registered as significant to me. We were sold, despite the part when the Gunny was killed by Pyle, a disgruntled recruit who was humiliated and hazed one too many times. I wanted to experience the brutality and humiliation that “Full Metal Jacket” so fully embodied. It was both terrifying and thrilling to watch. But what we saw felt beautiful and profane and dangerous - normal American kids transformed into war-ready combatants through barbarism and violence and the best marksmanship training in the world. Because of Stanley Kubrick’s previous work, many viewers expected a purely antiwar film. When the film was released in 1987, I watched it in a theater in Sacramento with a few other knuckleheads who were destined to join the Marine Corps. And drill instructors were happy to oblige. ![]() The boys who wanted to serve believed that intimidation and humiliation were essential to the formation of their warrior selves. ![]() The Gunny’s persona saturated military culture, especially that of the Marine Corps. It wasn’t just the film world on which Ermey’s character left an impression. The only thing they could try was homage to a famous scene and its defining character. Lee Ermey, a Marine Corps veteran who served two years as a drill instructor in the 1960s. The screenwriter, himself a Marine veteran of the Vietnam era, admitted to me that there was no way the filmmakers could ever top the “Full Metal Jacket” boot-camp sequences that were brought to life so intensely by R. A ghost filled the room: Marine Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. It closely resembled a boot-camp set from a movie I’d watched many times before. Still, the room gave off an ominous vibe. It was small and inconsequential compared with the mighty buildings and squad bays on Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, where I survived grueling training and verbal abuse 16 years earlier. It was the fall of 2004, and I was touring a film set at the studio that was adapting my war memoir, “Jarhead.” The screenwriter walked me onto a soundstage that was supposed to look like my Marine Corps boot-camp barracks.
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