Full Metal Jacket

Mirroring his part as a Marine Corp journalist Modine recounts through words and photographs his experiences working with Stanley Kubrick on the film Full Metal Jacket.

Anthony Swofford's Jarhead is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is a searing, unforgettable narrative. When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker. Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man. Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life. A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose but also for the depth of its pained heart.

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

"Extraordinary...Rich in irony and regret...[the] people and settings are vividly realized and his prose [is] compelling in its simplicity." THE WALL STREET JOURNAL As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives—as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.

"In this book the author examines representations of the Vietnam experience in film, oral history, novels, and short stories and finds that the media have helped remasculinize, or regender social relations. She argues that the war, instead of leading to a reexamination of the US value system, has spurred a revitalization of the traditional values of capitalism and bourgeois individualism."--Amazon.com.

A series of violent happenings add to a young woman's conviction that she is going to be murdered

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Martin Luther University, language: English, abstract: The Vietnam War was a traumatic event of the recent American history. Due to harsh criticism both at home and abroad of the American involvement in Vietnam, the film industry struggled to produce notable Vietnam War films during the conflict. Only in the late 1970s Hollywood came up with significant films that were trying to come to terms with the past. Down to the present day, the film industry has produced a number of Vietnam War films. What is special about these films is that they show a high level of diversity. In this seminar paper I will examine how the Vietnam War is portrayed in Full Metal Jacket and outline its context in relation with other filmic presentations of the Vietnam War. In particular, I will focus on the drafting and military drill of young men, as well as on the effects that the drill and the war itself had on recruits. I will first introduce the historical event the film is dealing with and outline its filmic presentations and film-historical context. Then I will briefly introduce the film and provide information regarding its historical context. The central question of this paper is, which specific perspective is illustrated in Full Metal Jacket and to what extent the film can be classified along other Vietnam War films. In resuming thoughts I will first establish what stance Full Metal Jacket takes towards the Vietnam War and how this perspective is created. Finally I will introduce selected scenes and examine the method of the film in portraying the Vietnam War.

Another major novel of the Vietnam experience fro one of its most startling able chroniclers- and its predecessor. (book jacket.).