![]() ![]() My platoon had its Private Pyles and though none ended up as he does in "Full Metal Jacket," I remember that they simply disappeared from our ranks, never to be heard from again. Furthermore, you want to break the breakable as soon as you can. When you're facing up to 75 young strangers you need to immediately establish absolute authority and hang on to it for 13 weeks. The screams and insults and profanity and physical punishment were all part of the DIs armamentarium. And why shouldn't he have, since his screen DI, Lee Ermey was in fact a real DI before he started acting (he played another DI in "The Boys of Company C," an earlier and lesser Vietnam flick)? He had a built- in technical adviser. For the most part Kubrick got Parris Island right on the money. Little had changed in those 10 years except the switch from M1s to M16s. The time period in the picture would have been about 1967, since the in-country sequence includes the '68 Tet Offensive. Though I've read only a couple of dozen of the nearly 500 comments on this film, I didn't see any from ex-Marines who'd had the Parris Island experience.
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