These are not the colorful dogfaces of World War II movies with their poker games, or the druggies in "Apocalypse Now." They have no wisecracks, we see no drugs, they get drunk when they can, and there is a Wall of Shame plastered with the photos of the girls back home who have dumped them. They go on patrols in the desert, looking for nothing in the middle of nowhere, and their moment of greatest tension comes when they meet eight Arabs with five camels. They sense a trap. Their fingers are on their triggers. They are in formation for action. Swofford and one of the Arabs meet on neutral ground. He comes back with his report: "Somebody shot three of their camels."
In a war like this, the ground soldier has been made obsolete by air power. Territory that took three months to occupy in World War I and three weeks in Vietnam now takes 10 minutes. Sykes warns them to expect 70,000 casualties in the first days of the war, but as we recall, the Iraqis caved in and the war was over. Now we are involved in a war that does require soldiers on the ground, against an enemy that no longer helpfully wears uniforms. Yet many of its frustrations are the same, and I am reminded of the documentary "Gunner Palace," about an Army field artillery division that is headquartered in the ruins of a palace once occupied by Saddam's son, Uday. They are brave, they are skilled, and death comes unexpectedly from invisible foes in the midst of routine.
"Jarhead" was directed by Sam Mendes ("American Beauty"), and it is the other side of the coin of David O. Russell's "Three Kings," also about the Gulf War. If Russell had Catch-22 as his guide, it is instructive that the book Swofford is reading is The Stranger by Camus. The movie captures the tone of Camus' narrator, who knows what has happened but not why, nor what it means to him, nor why it happens to him. Against this existential void, the men of the sniper unit shore up friendships and rituals. Their sergeant is a hard-ass, not because he is pathological but because he wants to prepare them to save their lives. They are ready. They have been trained into a frenzy of readiness, and all they find on every side, beautifully visualized by the film, is a vastness -- first sand, then sand covered with a black rain, then skies red with unchanging flames 24 hours a day.
It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but "Jarhead" does. They say a story can be defined by how its characters change. For the rest of his life, Swofford tells us, whether he holds it or not, his rifle will always be a part of his body. It wasn't like that when the story began.
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