Tara McCormack
posted 23 January 2006

Jarhead follows the experiences of a young soldier, the Camus-reading Anthony Swofford, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, as he joins the marines, is recruited to be a sniper, and then is sent to fight in the first Gulf War. Much of the film has a slightly dream-like quality. The soldiers seem to move about in their own world, with little contact with the outside, or the war which they imagine to be all around them, but never experience.

They train, train some more, and occasionally go slightly crazy from the tedium and uncertainty of it all. The most danger that the soldiers encounter is from their own army: one of the soldiers is accidentally shot during a training exercise still in America, and in Iraq, the troops come under 'friendly fire' from American planes zooming overhead.

Despite being first in Saudi Arabia and then Iraq, the soldiers hardly see any Arabs; those they do see appear and disappear like figures in a dream. At one point when the soldiers are on one of their many training exercises, a group of men with camels appears out of the haze. Swofford speaks to them and discovers that some of the camels have been shot, and the men melt back into the shimmering desert. A car passes by the soldiers when they are in the back of an army truck, a veiled woman is in the back seat of the car, only her beautiful, heavily-kohled eyes are visible. Later, the group comes across a heavily bombed convoy of civilian cars and buses, full of burned bodies, charred black beyond recognition, and still sitting where they died. They were retreating, says one of the soldiers. Swofford comes across several bodies sitting around a makeshift table, maybe a family who had been taking a break from the heat of the road, he sits down with the corpses, dazed, and as the horror sinks in, is sick. Day becomes night as the oil fields are set alight, the sky becomes black with smoke, and oil rains down. Night falls and the desert looks like a scene from a nightmare, with huge pillars of fire turning everything red. Swofford talks to an oil-soaked horse that wanders by.

Finally Swofford and his partner, (played by Peter Saarsgard) are sent off to shoot some Iraqi military commanders. Overcome with excitement and nerves at the prospect of finally killing someone, they set themselves up in an abandoned watchtower and train their gun on the distant Iraqis. Just as they are about to shoot, a senior officer arrives, and tells them that the entire building is to be bombed, and forbids them to shoot. Why not, they plead, they will be dead anyway. US bombers speed across the desert, and the military installation is destroyed in a second. On their return, as they approach camp, they hear some distorted wailing, they look at each other and grasp their guns, yes, yes, they think, finally, war…and then as they creep over the sand dune they see their platoon, drunk, and dancing round a bonfire. The war is over, their comrades shout at them, we're going home! The platoon has a heroes' welcome, as the bus drives through a town back in America, and a Vietnam vet climbs on board to shake their hands. All wars are different, reflects Swofford, and all wars are the same. But as the film seems to suggest, all wars are not the same.

For some commentators the first Gulf War can be understood as a 'traditional war', conforming to the UN Charter, in which the international community rallied to protect Kuwait's sovereignty from Iraqi aggression. Jean Baudrillard famously argued that in fact the Gulf War was a non-war, which did not happen. Of course the Gulf War certainly happened to the Iraqi soldiers buried alive in their trenches by US army bulldozers, or those unfortunate thousands of retreating soldiers and civilians who were incinerated by US bomber planes on the road to Basra in one of the most barbaric acts of the late twentieth century. However, underneath the hyperbole about the post-modern nature of the Gulf War, there is a serious point to be made that it was a war that cannot be understood as a 'traditional' war.

During the Cold War state sovereignty, although the formal organising principle of international relations, was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. It was a period of time not known for a lack of military intervention and activity, or the vigorous pursuit of national interests. Why then did the invasion of a small, autocratic country by Iraq, previously a favoured ally, armed as everyone knows by America and Britain during the Iran-Iraq war, turn into a global crises for the West? Far from being a aggressive opportunist who wished to hold the world to ransom through oil, Saddam Hussein believed that the US would not oppose an invasion, which was the result of quarrels over borders and oil prices (as foreign policy 'Realists' John Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt pointed out). It was the West who overnight turned Saddam into a pariah, a threat to world peace and stability, and a new Hitler, not Saddam himself.

For the West, the Gulf War was presented as a new kind of conflict, one based on morality and justice rather than the cold calculations of realpolitik and interests. Bush senior made a famous speech to congress in the aftermath of the war in which he promised a New World Order in which 'the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong…A world where the United Nations, freed from Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfil the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations' (March 6, 1991). When Swofford and the other soldiers first arrive in Saudi Arabia they are given a rousing speech by one of the officers. But the speech is not about American interests or strategy. To rouse their fighting spirit they are shown a picture of a Kurdish boy, with terrible facial wounds which are the result of a chemical attack by Saddam.

The Gulf War marked the beginning of the transformation of Western war and military intervention, from the pursuit of politics by other means, to the pursuit of morality and meaning by other means. Saddam timed his quarrel with Kuwait badly: a local fight, which in no way threatened Western interests or power, became an opportunity for the West to try and re-create a role for itself and a framework for the exercise of power after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Jarhead is a subtle film, in which the soldiers are sent not to fight a war but as a kind of stage army, a symbolic presence, whilst what little military engagement there is, is conducted by the air force. In portraying the unreality of their experience, and the lack of war, Mendes attempts to grapple with and represent some of the novel aspects of the new kind of war that was the first Gulf conflict.