2005-12-01 - 7:36 p.m.
Desert Rat
*UPDATED 9:03PM
I caught the 3:25 matinee of �Jarhead� today. I had listened to the book a week ago or so, and was interested to see what they would make of the story.
It�s pretty faithful to the basic layout anyway. I don�t feel like they captured the real (Love the Marines-Hate the Marines) heart of the book, and I didn�t think that they would be able too. Still the movie is fair, 6-10, and it brought back a heap of memories from when I was in the gulf.
I was thinking about certain changes that the movie �Jarhead� made over the book, and several things came to me.
While I was watching the film I was thinking to myself that the filmmakers must have had quite a bit of support from the military, specifically the USMC, to pull this off. You can�t just go down to Hertz and rent an M-1 Abrams tank for example.
I was also wondering why the filmmakers choose to depict the friendly fire incident as USAF on USMC, where in the book it is accounted as a Marine on Marine incident.
I admit that I was a little slow coming to the conclusion that the USMC might have nixed some of the themes that painted the beloved corps in a bad light in exchange for cooperation with hardware and support.
This is not new in anyway, the exact situation happened in �Blackhawk Down� The Army allowed the use of lots of equipment, and even SF personnel and pilots to train the actors and appear on film. (For example the Blackhawk and Little Bird pilots are the real deal and the guys ridding the skids are SF personnel) In return, the filmmakers agreed to tone down any anti Army elements from the book, including friendly fire incidents that occurred during the battle of Mogadishu. So like �Top Gun� was for the Navy, �Blackhawk Down� became a two-hour recruitment film for the Army.
It�s not conspiracy theory material; it�s simply a matter of
�If you want to use our gear, you play by our rules�
I believe the movie was filmed in the California desert, which from watching the film is a dead ringer for Saudi Arabia. The movie also manages to capture how bright the desert is during the day, especially during the scene when they first get off the planes.
I�ve got lots of pictures where everything is so bright that you can just barely make out the horizon, and if the dust is blowing, forget it. It is exactly like artic white out conditions, save for the heat of course.
The heat is one thing that the film didn�t manage to capture, at least not very well. Yes I know it is hard to make you feel the heat in a nice cool theater, but I�ve seen movies that make you want to stat fanning yourself and mopping your brow. Think of the sweatbox scene in �The Bridge Over the River Kwai�
They tell you that it�s hot, and sometimes you see guys sweating, but it�s just not convincing. The sweat is especially funny to me because you don�t sweat like that in Saudi. Don�t get me wrong, you do sweat, you sweat like a real mutha�, but since it is so incredibly dry there, it never collects on your skin or dampens your shirt like is shown in the film. You pour water down your throat, and you never take a leak, and it just pours out of your body into the air. The salt collects on your shirt in big white patches, but no water.
Anyway, they did get a lot of little things just right which is nice to see in a military movie, usually they get all the details wrong, and it drives me nuts because anyone who has managed to make it through boot camp could have done a better job then their �Military Advisor�
�Jarhead� got the little things right. I�m sure that if I spent a few hours with the pause button on my DVD player I could pick out some minor mistakes like whether or not the Humvees they used were the right model year for the first gulf war, but I didn�t notice anything on the first pass, and that is a first for me. (Maybe I�m just getting soft)
There are some very good performances, and some that could have been better. Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Moonlight Mile) is proving to be an excellent and versatile actor.
What I was really interested in was the casting directors ability to find the stock type personalities that seem to make up every military unit. I kept thinking, man that guy is exactly like so and so, and those guys are just like the two guys I hung out with in wherever.
I�ve wanted to write down my experiences in the gulf for a long time. I�ve even tried to a couple of times, but never got very far. Right now the �Individual Soldiers Story� is THE hot book item. I see a couple of new books on the current gulf war being released every week. From what I hear, not very many are well written, and none are as insightful as �Jarhead� was for the first gulf war.
I really don�t even want to hop on that bandwagon, and besides my time in the gulf was in 98-99, not exactly the height of the conflict. Of course there is irony in that I fired the same number of rounds at the Iraqi�s as Jarhead author Anthony Swofford did. (0)
I would like to get some of it down before it all slips away though. I was thinking about it on the way home from the movie and realized that while I remember my various radio call signs, (Victor 2, Alpha 1, Charlie 1 ect) I cannot remember what the base station in Saudi was. I�ll have to see if I can find some of my friends and ask them if they remember.
Anyway, I think I�ll take sometime when I get warmth to begin my story in installments.
Coming soon to a blog near you!
AIRHEAD
(One mans story of peacetime, camel spiders, and buttcan wailin�, in Saudi Arabia)
-Justus
