A brutal tale. A disturbing tale. A vicious tale. A creepy, overwhelming tale.
Get set to enter a savage world where men are turned into bloodthirsty killers.
Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is one thing; Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, the novel on which the film is based, accelerates to full throttle.
Oh,
yes, the film is tough, the film shows violence but compared to the
novel, it's as if Kubrick rounded off the many sharp edges of Hasford's
shrapnel.
Gustav Hasford takes your head and shoves your face
down into the gritty, green hell of what it meant, really meant, to be a
Marine in Vietnam.
His first day on Parris Island, our story's
narrator is given the name Joker by his drill sergeant. And we're right
there with Joker all during his Marine training and then when Joker is
shipped to Vietnam where he witnesses his Marine buddy growl,
grunt, chew and swallow a piece of human flesh; a helicopter gunner smoke
marijuana while firing his machine gun at a farmer in a rice paddy,
giggling as bullets tear the farmer to shreds; Marine Animal Mother talks
of his times fucking and killing twelve year old Gook girls - “If she's
old enough to bleed, she's old enough to butcher"; Marines hack off
ears, fingers, feet of corpses to serve as souvenirs; Marines torture
and set fire to rats to take the edge off their boredom; a Marine
crushes a Vietnamese child with his tank since he's driving as if in a
sports car.
For a more compete taste, smell and feel for
Hasford's saga, I'll link my comments to the author's actual words for
each of the novel's three sections:
THE SPIRIT OF THE BAYONET
Joker
as recruit at Parris Island: “Sergeant Gerheim explains that it is
important for us to understand that it is our killer instinct which must
be harnessed if we expect to survive in combat. Our rifle is only a
tool; it is a hard heart that kills.”
The sergeant goes on to
let all the men know if they survive recruit training, they'll be
ministers of death, praying for war. Joker reports coldly and
unapologetically on his own transformation to a hard-hearted minister of
death, as if what he's describing is happening to someone else.
“The
drill instructors are proud to see that we are growing beyond their
control. The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants
killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without
fear.”
Sergeant Gerheim detects the recruit he calls Gomer has
developed into a fearless killer but the drill sergeant doesn't like
Gomer's attitude since Gomer always remains silent and has ceased, in
spirit, to be part of the platoon. Gerheim has to remind Gomer of the
Marine Corps motto - semper fidelis, always faithful – and that “Gung
ho” is Chinese for “working together.” Will Gomer's nonconformist
attitude prove deadly? For Gustav Hasford to tell.
“Religious
services in the faith of your choice--and you will have a
choice--because religious services are specified in the beautiful
full-color brochures the Crotch distributes to Mom and Dad back in
hometown America, even though Sergeant Gerheim assures us that the
Marine Corps was here before God. "You can give your heart to Jesus but
your ass belongs to the Corps."”
Nothing like the military making sure everybody wearing the uniform believes they are killers in the name of God.
BODY COUNT
"I'm a combat correspondent assigned to the First Marine Division. My job is to write upbeat news features"
With searing irony, Joker acknowledges he's a public relations man for the
Vietnam war in general and for the Marine Corps in particular.
Nowadays, we might call Joker a spin doctor, putting his rhetorical
skills to work to make sure war is wrapped up in good, healthy
flag-waving. However, there's a benefit: Joker now has photographer
buddy Rafter who tags along with him wherever he goes, even into battle.
One
of the Marines tells Joker: "No Victor Charlie ever raped my sister. Ho
Chi Minh never bombed Pearl Harbor. We're prisoners here. We're
prisoners of the war. They've taken away our freedom and they've given
it to the gooks, but the gooks don't want it. They'd rather be alive
than free.""
This anti-Vietnam War sentiment would gain momentum
year by year, month by month, right up until the USA's dramatic
withdrawal.
Joker speaking to his Marine
photographer buddy following a spat of killing out in the field: "It's
not the kind of thing you can talk about. There's no way to explain
stuff like that. After you've been in the shit, after you've got your
first confirmed kill, you'll understand....Don't kid yourself, Rafter
Man, this is a slaughter. In this world of shit you won't have time to
understand. What you do, you become. You better learn to flow with it.
You owe it to yourself."
A necessary consequence of becoming a
killer: you're better not thinking about or reflecting on your actions.
And there's the rub: we're humans not robots, invariably we brood over
our past. How many times have Vietnam War vets relived their wartime
experience, over and over and over and over?
GRUNTS
"Sorry
Charlie is a skull, charred black. Our gunner, Animal Mother, mounted
the skull on a stake in the kill zone. We think that it's the skull of
an enemy grunt who got napalmed outside our wire. Sorry Charlie is still
wearing my old black felt Mouseketeer ears, which are getting a little
moldy. I wired the ears onto Sorry Charlie for a joke. As we hump by, I
stare into the hollow eye sockets....Charlie always smiles at us as
though he knows a funny secret. For sure, he knows more than we do."
The Short-Timers stings, a laconic and terrifying novel deserving a wider audience as we move deeper into our 21st century.
The Short-Timers is available free-of-charge via this link: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/i...
American author Gustav Hasford, 1947-1993
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