The scholarly debate over the Vietnam War is, of course, political. “The Left” and “The Right” argue over the “lessons” of Vietnam in the belief that past is prologue. The stakes of the debate are high. To the victor goes the ideological ascendancy and the ability to shape the future by controlling the perception of the past. Beliefs about the war are held so deeply, however, that there is reason to think that neither side may be able to defeat its fiercely ideological opponent.¹ As one of our ablest critics of war and culture notes, Vietnam continues to divide American society:

Probably the most awful class division in America, one that cuts deeply across the center of society and that will poison life here for generations, is the one separating those whose young people were killed or savaged in the Vietnam War and those who, thanks largely to the S-2 deferment for college students, escaped.²

These divisions are reflected in literary and historical writings about Vietnam. While there is an abundance of good fiction and autobiography on the war,³ most of it is scarred by its frankly partisan nature. There is, for instance, a vast difference between the gung-ho perspective of James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978) and the anti-war sentiments conveyed in Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Similarly, while there are a great many historical studies on Vietnam, we lack a detached and widely accepted synthetic history of the war. Geoffrey Perret comments on the way in which partisan war “poisons” scholarly debate:

There is a wide variety of general works on the war; nearly all written from a strongly held view that the war was wicked or stupid, a mistake or a plot, a crime of capitalism and imperialism, or a worthy effort by idealists to save South Vietnam from Communist tyranny. A truly objective history of the Vietnam War has yet to be written, but it will no doubt appear one day.⁴

Until that day, the student of Vietnam must wait. In the meantime, I would suggest Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket (1987) as an alternative method of rendering America's experience in Vietnam. The film is no less subjective than some of the better literary and historical treatments of Vietnam,⁵ but its ability to convey a nuanced historical argument through an artistic medium—in effect, to address simultaneously the audience's hearts and minds—is unique and deserves attention.

The film is loosely based on Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (1979), while the script was written by Hasford along with Kubrick and Michael Herr. Both Herr and Hasford were trained as journalists, and one of the film's chief virtues, namely its ability to present conflicting perspectives, can be traced to a journalistic pursuit of balance. Full Metal Jacket divides symmetrically into two parts: the first half, set in 1967, treats the U.S. Marines Corps' boot camp experience, while the second half of the film takes place in Vietnam immediately before and during the Tet offensive of 1968.

The boot camp sequence of the film is concerned primarily with the process of indoctrinating recruits into the military. The old aphorism that soldiering involves waiting may hold true for seasoned troops, but it is certainly not the case for recruits. The pacing of scenes in the first half of the film is brisk, and serves to convey the hectic experience of the recruit. Full Metal Jacket is seen from the perspective of “Private Joker” (Matthew Modine), a bright and, at times, rebellious recruit whose intelligence earns him the respect of the salty Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey). Private Joker's insight into the indoctrination process is revealed when Gunnery Sergeant Hartman asks Joker if he believes in the Virgin Mary. Joker says “No.” The Drill Instructor is outraged by Joker's blasphemy and offers him a chance to repent. Joker declines:

Sergeant Hartman: “Private Joker. I don't believe I heard you correctly.”

Private Joker: “Sir, the Private said ‘No, Sir,’ Sir.”

Sergeant Hartman: “Well you little maggot, you make me want to vomit.” [Strikes him.] “You had best sound off you love the Virgin Mary … Now you do love the Virgin Mary, don't you?”

Private Joker: “Sir, negative, Sir. The Private believes that any answer he gives will be wrong and the D.I. will beat him harder if he reverses himself, Sir.”

The Sergeant respects Private Joker's moral courage and immediately promotes Joker to squad leader.

As squad leader, Private Joker is assigned the responsibility of helping the seemingly hopeless private Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio), alias “Gomer Pyle.” Mild mannered and innocent, Pyle is the object of Sergeant Hartman's contempt. The Sergeant beats and berates Pyle to no effect. In a figurative gesture that shows the marines' attempt to break down the individual before rebuilding him, the Sergeant infantilizes Pyle by forcing him to run through physical training with his pants down while sucking his thumb. Nothing works. When Sergeant Hartman begins to punish the entire squad for Pyle's mistakes, resentment builds. The squad vents its anger by pinning Pyle to his bed one night and pummeling him. The sound of rock-hard soap bars thudding against Pyle's chest is muted only by his whimpers.

The powerful beating scene is critical to Pyle's character transformation, and embodies the film's argument about the military socialization process. Previously Private Joker has discerned one of the central dilemmas of military training: what might be described as the S.L.A. Marshall problem, namely how to inculcate civilians reared in a Western tradition, which emphasizes the sanctity of life, with a willingness to kill: “The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” Pyle is hardened by having been beaten by his comrades and internalizes the marine's creed all too well. He becomes a model recruit who develops a morbid fascination with killing. Hartman compliments Pyle on his marksmanship, but Pyle goes too far. Cut off from his comrades, he begins to talk to his rifle.

The final scene of the first half of the film occurs as Joker discovers Pyle in the latrine. Pyle sits on a toilet where he loads his M-14 with live ammunition. Pyle's tortured facial expression reveals his transformation from innocent adolescent to brutalized psychopath. The agent of this transformation, Hartman, arrives on the scene and attempts to disarm him. Pyle shoots the Sergeant and then commits suicide, literally blowing his brains out. The sociological transformation to trained killer is now complete. Next stop Vietnam.

To borrow Barbara Tuchman's remark on 1914, the Vietnam War “lies like a band of scorched earth” across modern American history. The turning point was 1968. Sometimes known as “The Hard Year,”⁶ 1968 saw the beginning of the decline of America's economy. LBJ's inability to choose between guns and butter, or more precisely between the Great Society and Vietnam, marked the start of America's deficit problems, a year of urban violence, campus protest, and political assassination. In Vietnam it was above all the year of the Tet offensive. It is in this historic context of 1968 as the turning point that Kubrick sets the second half of Full Metal Jacket. In an indelible scene, Private Joker and his fellow soldiers lounge around their quarters trading hyped-up war stories. Gently, thudding like the background percussion, V.C. mortars begin to fall on the American camp as “The Dixie Cups” sing:

          “Going to the Chapel,
and we're gonna get married.
          Going to the Chapel,
and we're gonna get married.
Going to the Chapel of love.”

The horrible contrast between the innocent music and the falling shells demarcates the scene as the pivot of modern American history. As we watch the marines' baptism of fire, circa 1968, “The Hard Year,” we feel that we are witnessing history.

Whereas in boot camp Private Joker's individualism earned him respect, in Vietnam this same quality works against him. During a Stars and Stripes editorial meeting (which covers such fine distinctions as “search and destroy” as opposed to “sweep and clear”) Private Joker's wisecracking and black humor earn him the enmity of his editor-Lieutenant and a posting to the front. As further punishment the C.O. assigns Joker the added responsibility of looking after the recently “in country” “Rafter Man” (Kevyn Major Howard).

Private Joker and Rafter Man's journey to the front provides Kubrick a vehicle to explore some of the most controversial aspects of the war. Catching a helicopter flight to the front, Private Joker and Rafter Man witness an American door gunner mowing down civilians while shouting “Get some! Get some!” above the din. Private Joker asks the gunner:

Private Joker: “How can you shoot women an' children?”

Rafter Man: “Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much.”

But Kubrick's portrayal of war atrocities is balanced, a quality which some historians, Gabriel Kolko for one,⁷ would do well to emulate. Thus Private Joker and Rafter Man see firsthand the mass graves of Vietnamese civilians executed by the North Vietnamese.

Full Metal Jacket's treatment of the volatile subject of race relations within the American Armed Forces is similarly balanced. On the one hand the film acknowledges racism: as a black marine is ordered to take the point he mutters “Put a nigger behind the trigger.” This same character, nicknamed “Eight Ball,” is also discriminated against when a Vietnamese prostitute refuses him on account of a familiar sexual myth. Yet the film portrays race relations as involving a much more complex process than straight-forward discrimination. “Animal Mother,” the white marine who only half-jokingly states: “All … niggers must … hang,” is quite willing to risk his life in order to save Eight Ball. Camaraderie, the film suggests, cuts across racial barriers.

Full Metal Jacket makes its most interesting historical arguments on the issue of causation. The second half of the film aims to answer the question which Norman Mailer posed: Why are we in Vietnam?⁸Full Metal Jacket's methodological approach to this question acknowledges the necessary inconclusiveness of much historical study. In Dispatches, screenwriter for the film Michael Herr has written on the ambiguous origins of America's involvement in Vietnam:

You couldn't find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1954 as the reference date; if you saw as far back as World War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. “Realists” said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission flack insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution … Anyway, you couldn't use standard methods to date the doom.⁹

“Standard methods,” of course, entail standard problems. As previously suggested, the chief problem with the current historiographical debate on Vietnam is its highly politicized nature. To use Herr's example, if the origins of the Vietnam War are traced to the 1954 Geneva accords, debate immediately focuses on political legitimacy. For if South Vietnam was a legitimate political state, the United States was assisting an ally to fend off aggression from the North. On the other hand, if South Vietnam was an artificial creation granted statehood by an act of diplomatic decree, it follows that America was intervening in a civil war.¹⁰

Full Metal Jacket is able to circumvent this dull, if highly charged, political debate by adopting unconventional methods for understanding this unconventional war. Thus the film offers two distinct, and conflicting, explanations to the question: Why are we in Vietnam? On the one hand, Full Metal Jacket suggests that American involvement in the war is rooted in this country's frontier past. Private Joker often impersonates John Wayne, while Joker's best friend is nicknamed “Cowboy.” In a scene in which soldiers are interviewed for their perspective on the war, one soldier derides Vietnam on the grounds that “There's not one horse in this country. There's not one horse in Vietnam. There's something basically wrong with that.” In this same scene a Marine likens the Americans to Cowboys:

“Who'll be the Indians?”

“Hey we'll let the gooks play the Indians.”

In this way Full Metal Jacket argues for an historical understanding of Vietnam which places the violence of the war squarely within an American context.¹¹

The second causal argument of the film rests on a dark reading of human nature. When asked by an officer why he wears a peace symbol along with “Born to Kill” written on his helmet, Private Joker replies:

Private Joker: “I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, Sir.”

Officer: “The what?”

Private Joker: “The duality of man, the Jungian thing, Sir.”

Joker might have more appropriately answered “the Reichian thing,” for in its linking of war and repression Full Metal Jacket is closer to Wilhelm Reich than Carl Jung. From boot camp the recruits were encouraged to hone their aggression by repressing sexual desire. Sergeant Hartman bellows:

“Tonight you pukes will sleep with your rifles. You will give your rifles a girl's name. Because this is the only [expletive] you people are going to get … you're married to this piece, this weapon of iron and wood. And you will be faithful.”

In another scene the recruits march around the barracks fondling by turns their rifles and genitals while chanting:

“This is my rifle,
          this is my gun.
This is for fighting,
          this is for fun.”

The consequences of this sort of repression are soon made clear when Private Pyle sucks his phallic M-14 before committing suicide. Revealingly, one of the few moments of non-combat in the second half of the film involves the squad releasing its sexual energy with a prostitute. As Full Metal Jacket's final credits roll, the Rolling Stones break into “Paint it Black,” perhaps the most vivid anthem to sexual frustration and aggression in a rock and roll genre studded with such songs. Thus in a provocative, though unproven, thesis Full Metal Jacket suggests that America's involvement in Vietnam has as much to do with repression as containment; unconventional methods indeed!

In summary, Full Metal Jacket is a deep and brooding meditation on the relationship between war and culture. The film focuses on two major questions about war, namely the socialization of recruits and the origins of war, yet still treats important sub-themes such as astrocities and race relations. The film manages a reasonably balanced presentation of those arguments, and, in this way, is superior to much of the written work on the Vietnam war. While balanced in a cerebral sense, Full Metal Jacket is an artistic success in its ability to convey the emotional intensity of both boot camp and combat.¹² The film's ultimate achievement, then, is its ability to address both the hearts and minds of the audience. In the film's final scenes the squad is pinned down by a V.C. sniper. As the sniper picks off squad members, the marines are whipped up into a frenzy. Yet when the sniper is flushed out, the enemy is revealed to be an adolescent girl. Riddled with bullets she begs to be taken out of her pain. As the scene's emotion pivots from blood thirsty frenzy to sympathy towards the enemy, the audience realizes how its feelings have been manipulated, and thereby gains insight into how socialization can transform civilians into killers. Private Joker, who has taken a critical view of the process, confronts the awful realization that the moral thing to do is to kill her. He does. And in doing so he succumbs to the indoctrination process which he resisted. Private Joker has become a fearless killer: “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece, and short. I am in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive. And I am not afraid.” The film closes as a formation of Marines sweep through the rubble of Hue. In an eerie salute to America's popular culture and their lost innocence, the marines sing a familiar childhood song:

“Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.”

As the Marines march through Dantesque flames, Kubrick suggests that war is, indeed, hell. But unlike much of the “committed scholarship” written about Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket offers no easy way out of this hell. In contrast to Gabriel Kolko's one sided condemnation of the American war effort, Kubrick offers no simple solutions to the moral dilemmas raised by war. Likewise, in its treatment of causation, the film displays a tolerance for conflicting explanation sometimes absent from academic debates about the war. The student may indeed have a long wait for “a truly objective ‘history’ of the Vietnam war” to be written. Until then, the student's time may be well spent contemplating Private Joker, the necessary murderer, neither condemned nor absolved.

Notes

1. A recent conference “The Sixties: Decade of Dissent,” sponsored by the Philadelphia Council of World Affairs and held at the University of Pennsylvania, illustrates the volatile nature of the Vietnam debate. Participants such as Timothy Leary, David Horowitz, sixties guru Todd Gitlin and numerous Vietnam veteran's, engaged in a fiercely partisan struggle. At one point, the debate nearly came to blows.

2. Fussell, Paul, Class, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), p. 14.

3. As Fussell notes in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), there are many similarities between the supposedly distinct genres of fiction and autobiography.

4. Perret, Geoffrey, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam—The Story of America's Rise to Power (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 609-610.

5. For an overview of the literature on the war see George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1979, 1986), p. 283.

6. Eugene McCarthy quoted in William O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), p. 360.

7. Kolko, Gabriel, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

8. Why Are We In Vietnam? (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1967).

9. Herr, Michael, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), pp. 50-51. In addition to Full Metal Jacket, Herr also wrote Captain's Willard's narrative in Apocalypse Now.

10. For differing perspectives on the war, compare Kolko's Anatomy of a War with Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). For an example of just how heated literary debates on the war can become see Timothy Lomperis, “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).

11. Hellman, John, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

12. Oliver Stone's film Platoon conveys the savagery of combat but fails miserably in its pose as a cerebral reflection on war. Platoon's final scene grafts a good vs. evil allegory upon the film which is as implausible as it is pretentious.