Steers and queers

R. Lee Ermey, famous for playing a hard-headed Marine Corps drill instructor in the Academy Award-nominated film “Full Metal Jacket,” has died at age 74, announced by his manager.

Ermey served 11 years in the US Marine Corps, spending 14 months in Vietnam and then in Okinawa, Japan, where he became staff sergeant, before being discharged in 1972. He was discovered by legendary director Francis Ford Coppola during the filming of “Apocalypse Now” and served as a technical adviser for the film, also playing the role of a helicopter pilot.

Eight years later in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam opus "Full Metal Jacket", he played the foul-mouthed and permanently shouting Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, with responsible for breaking in recruits. 

Perhaps channelling his own experiences, his diatribes towards his boot camp recruits include now famous quotes including the "only steers and queers come from Texas" and " I will give you three seconds, exactly three fucking seconds, to wipe that stupid grin off your face, or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull-fuck you!"

Full Metal Jacket was only one film "celebrating" the Vietnam War. Others include Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Casualties of War, and The Deer Hunter.

Every generation, every war, it seems, has its own celluloid story.

World War I films include All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, Gallipoli and War Horse.

World War II classics include The Great Escape, Saving Private Ryan, Inglorious Basterds, Dunkirk, The Dirty Dozen, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Dam Busters.

M.A.S.H. was set in the Korean War as was the more serious The Manchurian Candidate. Even the Anglo-Zulu war of the late 19th Century has been immortalised in the form of the classic Zulu.

The reality of war is, as we know, completely different from the heroism, friendship and adventure. The first casualty of war is innocence. But while some films are more gung-ho than the actuality, they all serve to remind us of the aggression, destruction, violence and destruction that war brings.

Some films glorify war, some explore the immediate and far-reaching impacts of war, but they all serve one purpose: in the words of John F Kennedy, "Mankind must put an end to war, before war puts an end to mankind".

RIP R. Lee Ermey.