Review of 'Jarhead' live by Mike Rosen on 850am KOA at 1pm ET today(Mike HATED the movie)

I was SO hoping this was going to be a good movie when I first saw the previews....so much for that. the more I hear, the more obvious it is that this is just another hit against our fighting military men and women!

I f@%king hate Hollywood!!!

Yeah. I am with you on that. No surprise there.

That's exactly what Mike said on his morning preview today. In the Rocky Mountain News this morning a Marine veteran reviewed the movie and trashed it royally as a hit piece on the Marine Corp.

Saw 'Jarhead' earlier this week ... on a one to five star rating (five best) I'd give it a three. As a former Marine I could identify with some of the movie ... but overall felt it was way over dramatized.

You can't make everyone happy. I've heard good things about this movie from my co-workers. Might give it a chance this weekend and form my own judgements then.

I saw the movie, did not think it was political but rather it concentrated on the down time of Marines and spoke of *Jody* quite alot.

I did think there was a funny moment when the plane overhead ready to drop some bombs were playing a 60's song and Swofford said *Hey that's Vietnam Music, we want our own!"

Movie was okay no biggie that's for sure...

Speakout: 'Jarhead' a viciously dishonest lie
By Tom Neven, Special to the News
November 11, 2005

By now you've probably read the varying reviews of Jarhead, the new movie that purports to be about the Marine Corps and the first Persian Gulf War. Based on the memoir of the same name by Anthony Swofford, both the movie and book bear only a superficial resemblance to anything real.

First, the book. Third-generation enlistee Swofford joined the Marines to escape a dysfunctional family, but unfortunately he brought a lot of that dysfunction into the Corps. In the end, he dishonored the uniform he wore.

In his book he boasts of stealing equipment from his fellow Marines and selling it on the black market, forcing them to pay for the loss of government property. He is openly contemptuous of his comrades (at one point he calls them "mouth-breathers") and puts on intellectual airs because he reads Sartre and Camus and they don't. (And lest I be accused of anti-intellectualism, I was a philosophy major in college.)

Worse, Swofford has been caught telling tall tales in what purports to be a nonfiction memoir, most notably attempting to pass off a well-worn urban legend about a malicious "Dear John" video as if he witnessed it himself. This hoary fib has been discredited by that great debunker of the spurious, snopes.com, and it's only one of many fishy anecdotes in Swofford's book.

Jarhead the book is a silly political manifesto, too, asserting that the Gulf War was fought to protect "the profits of companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House." Most egregious, though, Swofford relates an incident in which he threatened a comrade with a loaded weapon, twisting the rifle barrel into the man's ear until he broke down in tears. Swofford deserves to be court-martialed for that.

Instead, reviewers who have never worn a military uniform swooned over the supposed realism of Swofford's storytelling. Author Bing West, a Marine Vietnam vet, saw through the fawning reviews: "Far from telling the story of The Universal Soldier, the grunt's unadorned truth, as reviewers have intimated, Jarhead is the overwritten memoir of someone who did not experience serious combat. He either told tall tales or committed criminal acts under oblivious leaders whom he does not name. Either way, this is not how combat soldiers behave. Jarhead is to nonfiction what Platoon was to the movies: an insult to the American infantryman."

Add movie director Sam Mendes to the formula and you get a particularly noxious mix. As he did with American Beauty, Mendes has taken a few specific truths and extrapolated them to the whole. I served in three different infantry units over seven years in the Marine Corps, and I never encountered a unit remotely as dysfunctional or undisciplined as the platoon portrayed in this film. Sure, many Marines curse a blue streak, and some are obsessed with sex. And Mendes (with the help of unofficial Marine advisers) gets little details right, such as the way Marines talk or carry their weapons. But the overall image is a deeply dishonest lie because it relies on a misfit like Swofford for its basic story. It's unfortunate, too, that many people have gotten their impression of Marines from Swofford's book or will now do so through this movie.

Mendes is already a bit defensive about his film. He told Entertainment Weekly, "Our intention, above and beyond any specific narrative about the Gulf War, was to give human shape to these numbers you read about every day. Everyone thinks somehow that Marines are all the same. Which is, of course, nonsense."

But Mendes is trying to have it both ways, as did Oliver Stone with Platoon. Many people throughout the world will come away with the unmistakable impression that all American fighting men are foul-mouthed, sex-crazed, homicidal maniacs and that their wives and girlfriends back home are unfaithful harlots just itching to hop into the nearest bed. After all, they have the "word" of an actual former Marine.

Swofford got away with a lot with his 2003 book. Now that the story is being more widely told, I hope he's held to account for his self-indulgent, nihilistic fairy tale. In the end, the truth will find you out.

Tom Neven served seven years as a Marine Corps infantryman. He is the author of the book Do Fish Know They're Wet? and lives in Colorado Springs.

Rocky Mountain News

Swofford is the modern day equivalent of Tokyo Rose. The "Jodie" aspect of the film was the overiding aspect of the film. It is a cheap political ploy to make marines and soldiers, and airmen, and sailors, second guess their service.