Marines on the big screen.

• Author: Kaufman, Anthony
• Position: Jarhead - Movie Review

"THE MAN FIRES A RIFLE for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward ... he believes he's finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands--love a woman, build a house, change his son's diaper--his hands remember the rifle."--Jarhead

Jarhead, an adaptation of Anthony Swofford's best-selling Desert Storm memoir, is that unusual war film playing in theaters while American soldiers are dying in battle. It's a painful personal journey of one Marine and a muddle of patriotic ardor, bitter cynicism, and brazen machismo.

Dropped into a California boot camp with the ironic sounds of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" on the soundtrack, the clean-cut, blue-eyed Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets smacked across the head repeatedly by a drill instructor. "Swoff" begins to doubt whether signing the Marine Corps contract was such a good idea. Initially content to guzzle laxatives and read Camus' The Stranger in the toilet, Swofford later finds solace in a sniper unit on the eve of its deployment to the Middle East. After taking his first shots on the firing range, says Swofford, "I was hooked."

Once he has gone through the movie cliche of basic training--the screaming sergeant, the multicultural platoon, the agonizing exercises--director Sam Mendes (American Beauty and Road to Perdition) quickly dispatches the platoon to the sand-strewn reaches of Saudi Arabia where the mission, as Lieutenant Colonel Kazinski (Chris Cooper) bellows to the troops via bullhorn, is to protect the oil fields of "the House of Saud."

Once there, a startling scene reveals the disturbing mob mentality of recruits aching for combat. Creatively adapted from the book, the sequence shows a platoon watching the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter attack from Apocalypse Now. Jarheads scream in anticipation of the helicopters' strafing of the seaside village: "Shoot the motherfuckers," yells Gyllenhaal's Swofford.

Rather than illustrate the bloodthirsty insanity of war, as director Francis Ford Coppola might have intended, war movies act as a stimulant, the real-life Swofford explains, hyping up soldiers for battle.

"Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man," he writes in the book. "With film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history...