There are a couple of moments when the picture suggests there might be something positive about the world it describes. If it would be naive to think that these things are the whole story about life in the armed forces, the only reality, why is it not equally naive to believe that they are no part of the story at all - that, in effect, it is the negative things which are the whole story? Let politics be f*****, and let us confine ourselves to the patriotism, honor etc. 'F*** politics!' as Swoff's best buddy, Allen Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), puts it. Swofford and Mendes both seem to take for granted the typical Hollywood anti-warrior's casual assumption that Desert Storm was all a matter of 'blood for oil,' but not to be particularly interested in the fact.

And that's all without even getting into the matter of why the armed forces are deployed in the first place. Things like patriotism, honor, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice. Its own vanity about knowing certain things about the military life - its violence and brutality, its coarseness and cynicism, its cruelty and bloodlust, its enormously powerful but mostly repressed and surreptitious sexuality - blinds it to the other sorts of reality traditionally associated with soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. That's why Jarhead - the name alludes to the Marine haircut - is itself such a naive film. Those who in their own conceit are wiser and smarter and more clued-in than other people are obviously less likely than other people to be persuadable that their take on reality is a partial one, or in need of any correction. The result, however, is an extra measure of that vanity of opinion to which we are all too subject anyway. Her fleeting glimpse into the reality of the men's lives is extended and prolonged by the much wiser, much more clued-in film-makers for our benefit. How naive she was to think that they were telling her what they really thought! Or that they were cheerful, clean-living boy scouts who were only too glad to show her their indifference to hardship. The game ends with their stripping off the suits and engaging in a simulated sex act as the journalist is hustled away. As a demonstration of their readiness for any threat, they are instructed to play a game of football - in the desert at mid-day - in their CBW suits and hoods. Just look, for instance, at the scene in Jarhead in which a stateside journalist is brought in to observe Swoff's unit, and the men are carefully instructed in what to say to her - and what not to say.

Swofford and Mendes to tease it out for us - to write, film, and ratiocinate their way to the presumptively hidden truth behind a myriad of illusions. Of course, if the reality of soldiering were readily accessible, there would be no reason for extra-smart people like Messrs. That word reality has a power to fascinate writers and journalists as well as film-makers like no other. Get it? Swoff is not only the autobiographical presence in this film, he has also cast himself in the familiar role of the sensitive soul surrounded by coarse and brutal men who are less intelligent than he and therefore less able to understand the 'reality' behind their experiences as Marines in the first Gulf War. A Marine drill sergeant ridicules him for his choice of reading matter, pronouncing the author's name as Came-us. The tell-tale moment in Sam Mendes's movie version of Anthony Swofford's book, Jarhead, comes early on when the young recruit, 'Swoff' (Jake Gyllenhaal), is sitting on the toilet reading a translation of Albert Camus's L'Etranger.

Jarhead the movie part 1