Neither Marine nor Maggot: Full Metal Jacket and the Crisis of Masculinity

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In October 2024, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump stood before his gathered rally attendees and made a promise: he would build a “Trump military” out of the supposed ruins that he claimed President Biden had made of the armed services. Behind Trump, giant screens played a video that demonstrated his vision: Scenes from the bootcamp section of the movie Full Metal Jacket played interspersed with snippets of social media posts made by military personnel in their off-duty time. The movie scenes depicted Gunnery Sergeant Hartman yelling at Marine recruits training for the Vietnam War in 1967. The social media snippets showed military personnel in various forms of drag or who were transgender. In a follow-up post on social media, Trump claimed, “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” Now that Trump is President and has appointed Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense, he claims to be following through on that pronouncement. However, in its pursuit of a cinematic past, the Trump administration not only misinterprets the movie, but also demonstrates an obsession with a vision of the military as it never was.

Full Metal Jacket has haunted the American psyche since it was first released in 1987. It suggested that Americans were once tough enough to endure the hell that was Marine training and the Vietnam War. Ostensibly a movie critical of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, it serves as a kind of “war porn.”^[1] The first half of the movie depicts Marine recruit training at Parris Island in graphic and gory detail. The lead character, nicknamed Joker in bootcamp, describes training as “an eight-week college for the phony-tough and the crazy-brave.” For nearly an hour, the movie depicts Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman pushing the platoon of trainees to their breaking point, or past their breaking point in the case of a recruit nicknamed Pyle. After Hartman’s brutal treatment, Pyle graduates from bootcamp. He was “born again hard,” according to the drill instructor – only he accomplishes his transformation into a Marine and a killer far too well. On graduation night, Pyle snaps, murders Hartman, and then commits suicide.

The rest of the movie follows Joker through the Tet Offensive in Hue—not that we ever watched it past the ending of the bootcamp scene, as I would discover after I joined the U.S. Army and finished with my own training as a combat engineer and in airborne school. In my own experience, it was Hartman’s cruel training methods and unapologetically crude language that made the movie resonate. Bootcamp in Full Metal Jacket was a safe way to learn that “war is the spectacle of the masculine bond.”^[2]

Despite this, Full Metal Jacket showed a version of Marine bootcamp that never truly was. In 1956, following the deaths of six recruits in a training accident at Parris Island, South Carolina in what came to be called the Ribbon Creek Incident, the Commandant of the Marine Corps condemned reckless training and “deplored the abuses that he said had crept into recruit training since World War II.”^[3] Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s casual physical violence and raving cruelty did not reflect how the Marine Corps wanted to train its recruits in 1956 or after. Even after the war, Hartman-style drill instruction was discouraged. By contrast, a 1982 front-page story on drill instructors in the Los Angeles Times described DI Gunnery Sergeant Jose A. Garci’s approach to instruction as treating even the most belligerent recruits “with the drill instructor’s leadership by example, with firmness and quiet control.”^[4]

Nevertheless, Trump’s lionization of the fictional Hartman–if not Hartman’s actual training style–was familiar to me. All throughout my time in the U.S. Army (1998-2002), the bootcamp scenes shaped a popular vision of masculinity and military service that I—and just about every other soldier I served with—seemed to be searching for. For fellow combat engineers in the 82^nd Airborne Division, the Marine bootcamp scenes showed the training of a kindred service we identified with, even if we were not Marines ourselves.^[5] The movie was constantly on in the barracks where I served, and we would hit rewind at the end of the bootcamp scene just to watch it again. Everyone seemed to want to act like Hartman, speak like Hartman, mimic Hartman. His vicious and bigoted words were our “gruntspeak,” or “a specialized discourse the Marine Corps employs as a mechanism of socialization and thought control.”^[6]

What those words allowed the unit to do was bond in a same-sex, “homosocial” environment as a supposed “crisis in masculinity” drew us to the film—something that Trump would later try to seize upon in the aforementioned campaign video, and in subsequent moves to remove women from combat roles and military leadership.^[7] One way to make sense of the intense sexualized yet homophobic language my fellow soldiers and I endlessly threw at each other, was to see our gruntspeak as a way to make it clear that, though we might have formed close bonds and even intimate connections in the service, we did not desire each other sexually, but only platonically.^[8] In male-only spaces, such as the unit I served in, homosocial bonding allowed us to imagine that we were neutralizing sexuality in our relationships (even though sexuality has long been a core of “what soldiers do” in the U.S. military throughout history).^[9]

Masculinity, it seems, is always in crisis, always fragile, just in different ways.^[10] One particular “crisis” followed a decade from the end of the Cold War to the start of the War on Terror that made the movie popular with people like Trump, his supporters, and my fellow soldiers.^[11] Conservative pundits emerged at this time as a powerful voice of cultural and social change.^[12] They argued that the military was, to our detriment, now a “kinder, gentler service.”^[13] They argued that the military had been effectively “feminized” by an Army eager to recruit women.^[14] Making space for women in the military, so conservatives argued, meant lowering physical fitness standards to make sure that women could pass the training standards. Training, they said, was less rough as a result. This idea was widespread; as one writer snidely put it in a letter to the Chicago Defender, “kinder, gentler Army drill sergeants no longer verbally dress down recruits. It might hurt their self-image.”^[15]

Conservative commentators’ complaints gained cultural purchase, which Full Metal Jacket only seemed to reinforce. Wrote one, “Drill instructors always have been wrathful Old Testament gods to recruits, but now DI’s are, in too many cases, essentially the first fathers in the recruits’ lives.”^[16] Even some Army drill sergeants fretted about the new generation.^[17] Soldiers in the 1990s were labeled “a Nintendo generation,” or, as one drill sergeant was quoted as saying, “the couch potato generation.”^[18] The movie therefore provided a cultural language, almost a set of instructions, for remasculinizing America and its men.^[19] The recruits like Joker earned their manliness. They started the movie as “ladies,” “pukes,” or “maggots,” but they ended as Marines, “real men ready for war.^[20] My fellow combat engineers and I were no longer maggots, since we had made it through Army basic training, but we were not Marines either. Hartman and Full Metal Jacket offered us a comforting fiction that we could be if we were tough enough to withstand the type of treatment Hartman bestowed upon his trainees.

Clips of Hartman’s brutal training and coarse language also contrasted with the limits of the all-volunteer military that predominated after the end of the draft in 1973. The post-draft Army built itself, as the historian Beth Bailey succinctly puts it, by “replac[ing] the logic of citizenship with the logic of the market.”^[21] What she means is that, historically, the draft had anchored military service as an obligation of citizenship, something men were obliged to do. But, by the 1980s, the Army promised soldiers like us that we could “Be All You Can Be,” a call to service as a choice of self-improvement, or as Bailey offers, the idea of Army service shifted “from service toward opportunity, from obligation to benefit.”^[22] In the process, men may have lost a gendered way of identifying themselves, something that the increasing presence of women in the military may also have contributed to. I and those I served with and were, furthermore, children of the decade of “you,” of a military service that reflected a broader cultural embrace of the individualized sense of self that made it “you” alone who must solve your problems.^[23] Trump’s 2024 video also seized on this difference, contrasting the homogenized recruit training of the movie with the individual expression of the modern service personnel, valorizing the uniformity of the movie’s recruits while associating individuality with weakness.

The Trump administration’s obsession with brutality as a form of masculinity and of military lethality, therefore, resonates with the issues of the decade between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. During this period, conservative pundits and politicians made the supposed softness of the U.S. military a core part of the “culture war” that they launched in 1992, capturing fears that resonated broadly, even within the military. This is despite Trump’s own choice to avoid service in Vietnam—a “working class war” in which rich men like him were overwhelmingly able to avoid fighting (and, of course, a war that the United States did not win).^[24]

Full Metal Jacket seemed to offer some hope of recapturing a stronger yet ultimately mythical past – if only we spoke like Hartman and could survive his brutal training. Yet the homophobic, transphobic, sexist, racist language and brutal treatment that Trump glorifies—his “end of wokeness”—only serve to traumatize, not prepare people to serve their country. After all, in the movie, the character Pyle, who arguably learns how to be a “real man” from Hartman’s brutal training, ends up using that same training to kill both his instructor and himself. Perhaps Trump—just like my fellow soldiers—needs to stop rewinding, and instead watch Full Metal Jacket to the end.

Notes

1. On graphic anti-war movies as a sort of pornography, see Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003), 63. ↑
2. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989), 73. ↑
3. Wayne Phillips, “Marine Training Now Changed,” New York Times, July 29, 1956. ↑
4. Lanie Jones, “Marine Corps Drill Instructors Drilled in Leadership,” Lost Angeles Times, September 5, 1982. In addition to the Ribbon Creek deaths, the piece also mentions a 1976 bootcamp death of one recruit who killed another recruit during pugil stick training. ↑
5. On the airborne as the elite of the regular U.S. Army, see Robert F. Williams, The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers who Shaped America’s Cold War Army (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025), 14-21. Williams also emphasizes the connection between the Marines and airborne Army soldiers, Williams, The Airborne Mafia, 8. ↑
6. Roy Bourgeois Zimmerman, “Gruntspeak: Masculinity, Monstrosity, and Discourse in Harford’s The Short-Termers,” American Studies 40, no.1 (spring 1999): 66. The Short-Termers is the novel that was adopted into a film. ↑
7. Women did not serve in combat arms professions like combat engineer until the 2010s. ↑
8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1. ↑
9. On all-male spaces and discourse, see Sedgwick, Between Men, 16. On the history of the U.S. military and sex, see Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 8-9. ↑
10. For a classic example on the moment when a crisis in masculinity helped fuel a national obsession with manhood at the start of the twentieth century, one interlocked with race and civilization, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). ↑
11. The decline in factory work for non-college educated men in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s caused a crisis in the breadwinner ideal and the underpinnings of masculinity. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). ↑
12. Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (New York: Basic Books, 2022); and Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020). ↑
13. Stephanie Gutmann claimed that the military betrayed its warrior culture to make service more attractive to women who otherwise had no interest in service. Stephanie Gutmann, The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America’s Gender-neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? (New York: Scribner, 2000), 14-15. On the history of integrating women in the U.S. military, see Tanya L. Roth, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). ↑
14. Patrick Buchanan made women in combat and the righteousness of a strong, manly military the cornerstone of what he called the “culture war.” Patrick Buchanan, “Culture War Speech: Address to the Republican Convention,” August 17, 1992, accessed October 19, 2024, https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-culture-war-speech-speech-text/. On the conservative opposition to women in combat, see Paul Richter, “House Panel Backs More Separate Sexes in Basic Training,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1998. ↑
15. Daniel John Sobieski, “The Purpose of Military,” “The People Speak,” Chicago Defender, January 10, 1998. ↑
16. George F. Will, “Rough and Ready,” Washington Post, November 22, 1998. ↑
17. The Army created drill sergeants as a response to Marine Corps’ successes with drill instructors in recruit training during WWII and the Cold War. “A History of the Drill Sergeant,” U.S. Army Drill Sergeant, accessed October 19, 2024, https://www.army.mil/drillsergeant/history.html. For a history of the drill sergeant that contextualizes them within the broader history of the Army’s non-commissioned officer corps, see Earnest F. Fisher, Guardians of the Republic: A History of the Noncommissioned Officer Corps of the U.S. Army (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), 299-300. ↑
18. Michael Fumento, “At War with the Fat of the Land,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1997. Army leadership did not necessarily agree that soldiers were too soft in the 1990s, reporting that “a less-rebellious generation proved more tolerant of military rigor,” in a news item on how much the Army had improved since the post-Vietnam era, mandating less harsh training techniques. John M. Broder and Douglas Jehl, “The Army Does an About-Face,” New York Times, April 20, 1991. ↑
19. Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America, xi. While her analysis focused on the Vietnam War side of the movie and the source novel, our remasculinization came from the bootcamp half. ↑
20. On the U.S. Marines Corps and masculinity, see Mark Ryland Folse, The Globe and Anchor Men: U.S. Marines and American Manhood in the Great War Era (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2024). ↑
21. Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4. ↑
22. Bailey, America’s Army, 195. ↑
23. On the decade of “you,” see Eli Cook, “Rearing Children of the Market in the ‘You’ Decade: Choose Your Own Adventure Books and the Ascent of Free Choice in 1980s America,” Journal of American Studies 55, no. 2 (May 2021): 418-45. ↑
24. Roughly 80 percent of draftees during the war “came from working class or poor backgrounds.” Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 6. ↑

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Featured image caption: Marines fire upon fleeing Viet Cong during Operation New Castle. (Courtesy (a href=”https://catalog.archives.gov/id/5891328″>National Archives)