Short Timers

The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, 180 pages

"The Marines are looking for a few good men."  So the young man we know only as Joker enlists.  He soon learns more.  "The Marine Corps does not want robots.  The Marine Corps wants killers.  The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear."  If he never quite reaches that ideal, he pursues it, never alone, but always in the company of his fellow Marines, through the narrow hell of boot camp on Parris Island and the wider hell of war on the banks of the Perfume River.  "I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human being.  With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with just the slightest pressure of one finger.  And, knowing that, I was less afraid."

The Short Timers is no doubt best known as one of the two semi-autobiographical novels on which the film Full Metal Jacket is based (the other being Dispatches by Michael Herr).  The book is significantly different from the film - more brutal, more repetitive, and also more obvious.  Questions of credibility arise at certain points - how many Stars and Stripes photojournalists dabbled in cannibalism?  Perhaps more than one might think, but at times the reader will be very conscious that this is a novel and not a direct factual account, a problem that is compounded by some surreal sequences and others which are ambiguously unreal.  If the writing is uneven, however, there are certainly more than enough unforgettably visceral passages to justify the trouble.