Jarhead

In the new Sam Mendez film Jarhead, Jake Gyllenhall plays Anthony Swofford, a young man who is ambivalent about joining the Marines but ends up spending months and months being trained as a sniper. Soon he finds himself in the Middle East, preparing for war with Saddam Hussein, but the war doesn't turn out as he had expected.

Jarhead is in some ways a conventional war movie, with the requisite scenes of military hazing; male bonding; a motely crew including gung-ho killers, nutzoids, and geeks; continual penis jokes; and the horrors of war. There are some friendly fire accidents, instances of military censorship, and a few glimpses of how the war’s image was handled by the Pentagon. (It was one of the first fully televised wars, and the military wanted to carefully control what the world saw. This effort remains in effect today, with the Pentagon’s prohibition against publishing or broadcasting images of the coffins of war dead.) What makes Jarhead so interesting is that it shows a side to a soldier’s life that is often overlooked: the tedium of waiting for something to happen. War movies thrive on action: people shooting at each other, things getting blown up. But that’s only a small part of the soldier’s experience-—just as many police officers never fire their weapons, many soldiers never really see the battle action they have prepared for.

What happens when all that that effort, all the pain, all the months of training and abuse, seem to be wasted? The real ground-assault of the Gulf War was a four-day rollover victory in 1991, led by Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf. When the word comes that the ground war is essentially over, the Marines—-and the audience-—feel a complex range of emotions. Most are desperate to go home and get out of “The Suck” (as it’s called), yet many of them never really got to see combat, never got to have their mettle tested in the heat of battle. It’s not that they want the war to go on, or that they necessarily want to kill anyone; but instead they feel a palpable and fascinating frustration, a buildup without release.

Jarhead depicts the uncertainty of military life. The troops are uncertain when or even if they will be called into battle; uncertain if their wives and girlfriends back home are being faithful; uncertain if each new stranger is extending a friendly hand or a rifle. They are also uncertain if the untested anti-nerve gas pills they are issued will save them from a horrible death or actually cause neurological damage. Jarhead has many jarring scenes, for example the ones set in the shadow of the burning Kuwaiti oil fields, plumes of furious fire shooting into the sky and coating everything in a toxic film. In the middle of this surreal scene, Swofford finds a doomed, oil-coated horse trodding through the sand and we remember that war leaves subtle, minor tragedies as well.

The nature of war has changed, and ground troops-—in this case anyway-—were left with their, um, guns flapping in the wind, feeling obsolescent as mighty military air strikes destroyed their targets (and, tragically, many who are not their targets). Killing often takes place on a greater scale, with the attacks sanitized and removed from the carnage. As former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters put it on his 1992 album Amused to Death, killing is often done with “the bravery of being out of range.”

The film is based on a memoir by Gulf War veteran Anthony Swafford. Despite appearances and some parallels to the war in Iraq, Jarhead is not a political film. It has nothing particular to say about American aggression in the Middle East, or about the politics of oil. Like Black Hawk Down, Three Kings, and Rules of Engagement, Jarhead is set in the present era and involves real, recent wars, while Apocalype Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket told stories of earlier wars. Iraq may end up being this generation's Vietnam in cinema, if not in reality. More a character study than a war movie, Jarhead is a fascinating if imperfect look at a soldier’s life.