US Marine Breaks Down Military Movies | GQ

what's up GQ I'm James LaPorta I'm the former US Marine infantryman and this is the breakdown [Music] first up jarhead I don't even know how many jarheads that they're up to now but it has nothing to do with the original jarhead there is one jarhead all the others are booked for a lack of a better term so this is one of the more accurate movies black or brown or yellow or red you are now green before I've even started I'm seeing things that are standing out to me his haircut is correct when guys enter boot camp the first thing you're doing is you're getting your head shaved the uniform is good it is accurate in terms of the time period so early 90s what is absolutely ugly is the back barracks or her especially recruit barracks are not that white it looks like they're in a mental ward the blankets are usually green they're like these wool green blankets that look like they're straight out of like the Cold War so that is what stands out to me I mean what is accurate is yeah the bunks are made and that is exactly how you would hang your towels usually some guys they wouldn't even get under their bed because when you're getting woken up at like 3:30 4:00 in the morning by drill instructors you don't have a lot of time you have to everything is sort of on a countdown and so they don't even get under the covers they just sort of sleep on top of their bed you know so it's already made and they just have to sort of straighten it up go back okay so that is all accurate that's called staining online you have to do that a lot I used to hide behind a stanchion if you're lucky your rack is near one and so when the drill instructor is sort of looking down the line like that you can sort of like lean back and hide and this there you don't have those stations but that is accurate in terms of guys on both sides sort of staring at each other not moving and you're just sort of hoping nobody drill instructor doesn't see you glancing down the line sir yes sir yes again mother Jodi's banging her right now get on your face and give me 25 she gets pause it in terms of the yelling that that's accurate it sort of depends on the person so because there's been so many sort of incidents that have happened there's a lot of oversight in terms of the behavior of DRO instructors like Joan truckers are not supposed to be custom so a lot of drill instructors you'll see you'll hear them get around it like bad dog you know or something like that but usually general trucker would look around to make sure like no higher-ups are there and they would you know they'll still costs again mother Jodi's banging her right now get on your face and give me 25 for every time she gets this month down on your face oh let's go back Jodi is a real thing Jodi in the Marine Corps is almost like a urban myth Jodi is the person to wear if you're deployed or you're a boot camp or you're out the field training Jodi is the guy who's back home taking your wife out on a date or having sexual intercourse with your girlfriend good at drugs so you might sprite then these are mice prime supposed to know how to draw in terms of him being a scribe that's a real thing there's also artist recruits and so they draw all the art the drawings are always something to deal with either war or death that's what they tend to draw for the drama friends cuz they look cool think when I'm giving you a few left tips you're going to fire your rifle when grenades are going off in your face we've been doing here sir yeah that that's happened again not commonplace amongst both phases and not commonplace drone traders they actually have a card in terms of how long they can make a recruit do push-ups make it recruit do sit-ups if there's a lot of regulation but I mean even in perfect worlds where there are systems in place to not allow things to happen things have and like a drill instructor slamming someone's head into a board it stop right there this is even though this is very subtle this is incredibly accurate so this is what is known as a boot drop so basically what has occurred is these Marines have graduated boot camp right from there they'll have like a week off I think it's like ten days and then from there they'll go to the school of infantry but the reason I wanted to pause this is because there is a fear in all these Marines and it's the same fear that I had those Marines standing on sort of the catwalks of the upper decks are looking down at these brand-new guys you can imagine some of them are already veterans themselves from war and so you're just staring at these guys who are going to eat you alive I was severely hazed sort of when I first showed up to my first unit you know it took me many many years to realize after that that it was that they were dealing with things that they probably had been in therapy for it wasn't because me being the new guy whose because they had just come back from seeing their friends died in Iraq that is accurate it's one of those things that is not commonplace across the entire Marine Corps but has it happened absolutely so they'll take literally an iron and they'll bend it into to spell out USMC and they will brand people now again this is not a commonplace thing I did not see it in my time and I served from 2006 to 2014 I've seen pictures of it that is accurate for the early 90s and even into the 80s I mean I wasn't branded but something similar in terms of sort of the gang mentality we were training on the field I'm still a new marine someone had found out that I had a huge fear of snakes I had six senior guys hold me down and they found these snakes out in the woods and I mean I was I was fighting tooth and nail it was at least one that he put on my chest and I was freaking out you know and then someone said hey guys knock it off we gotta go have a we have a briefing to go to you know within the field before we were supposed to run our range so again I didn't get branded but that is sort of mentality of like the senior guys ganging up on a new guy that's accurate next up stripes right right left right you stay in place left right left right left right left right left but hi all right let's rewind that so in marching you're supposed to start on your left foot everything has some sort of meaning behind it you're judged down to the inch you know in terms of badges and ribbons have to be at a certain inch the guy in front of you is supposed to be 40 inches from your chest everything has a structure to it but it takes a while for some people to get the hang of marching general searchers have a couple of tricks because at boot camp it's not just the recruits that are getting judged the higher Command Authority is actually judging the drone structures themselves so drill is a huge part of that so far everything is accurate there is a comedic element guys looking around like laughing and stuff like that there'd be a drill sergeants probably screaming at them [Music] posit while a funny scene no guys gonna just start singing the drill sergeant is in charge of that and if some random recruit just started singing in the middle of his formation he wouldn't be singing for long do we sing yes singing is common in the military across the military services you wouldn't belt out if the right senior enlisted soldier or marine or officer is standing around because it is incredibly violent alright let's fast-forward [Music] pause scribe this is very much like a director like let's make it look like a really active military base where you know there's formations going every which way it happens but it's like it's comes off as fake to me all these tanks driving behind all these formations and you know all at the same time cuz you got to think about it bases themselves are also small cities there are tons of civilians that work on base yeah overall they got the basic idea right but they are taking what we would call artistic liberties next up Hacksaw Ridge it's a true story Desmond Doss yep middle one recipient world war true you and so he served as a combat medic but at that time combat medics didn't carry weapons they just tended the wounded they wanted to put him on the frontlines and be in the infantry and he was a conscientious objector and went to a court-martial but he won constitutionally they were the army was trying to were violating his rights but he went on to earn the Medal of Honor yeah so real story and a crazy story those Oscars I've seen them really depends on the base but those are common even you know the the sort of where they have to climb up and go down these are specifically called circuit courses or could even pass for the O course which is an obstacle course so yeah especially if it's like a timed event you know you have this long to get through the obstacle course so he's got a clipboard right there it's a timed event so yeah people are racing to try to get the best time a heartbreaker age yeah oh oh it kills me about this the one thing I've never been able to live down about this movie is if I remember correctly there supposed to be a camp lejeune there is not a single mountain near Camp Lejeune North Carolina obviously they're in California that ruins it for me accurate this is not boot camp they're already in the fleet they're shooting m16 a one's came out of the Vietnam War a lot of people don't know that the lower half of an m16a1 in Vietnam what is plastic and actually it was developed by Mattel so this is all Akron's this is a regular firing range it's common in both boot camp and in the fleet so what's not accurate is you'd have way more people because you know shooting guns safety is paramount and things can go wrong when people start shooting weapons so that's why there'd be way more people that's accurate so it was called the Pitts and actually that one guy one person just put up a lollipop there are these carriages down there in the pits you can see them there's Marines down there they're putting targets up those are point targets and they're bringing them down so someone shoots they'll bring it down the mark where the shot was and they'll put it back up and show where the shooter shot but that's all accurate there's a red line in the pits and if you stay behind that red line you won't get shot however I was on the range once a drill instructor got shot in the leg so the ground hit the carriage that liked that either the left or right side of the carriage that's holding the target and and ricocheted and hit him in the leg despite him being behind the red line keep it tight first I want to know what I would love to know what yard line where he hit that so we shoot from the 200 yard line the 300 and the 500 yard line it's because I'm questioning that accuracy putting that aside people flagging the line happens all the time and it is scary they lack muzzle awareness they lack just common sense thinking of like I need to keep my weapon pointed downrange I mean they would be immediately kicked off the range because that is incredibly egregious and incredibly dangerous but yeah that happens a lot what is in actor right there is for his rough as indisciplined as Clint Eastwood's character is and he's trying to instill discipline into this recon platoon he would not have them walking around without their chin straps undone vain if you ever watched John Wayne movies he always had his chin strap undone middle of combat and somehow his helmet never falls off all right next up Full Metal Jacket Holly Emery was there's a great story about how he sort of worked his way into getting this role he was the military advisor for Stanley Kubrick on on this movie he was not meant to be in the movie but the actor that they had hired to be the drill instructor it just wasn't that and polyamory was in the Marine Corps was a staff sergeant and was a drill instructor in real life and he just had that sort of rhythm Joe instructors have a certain rhythm to how they speak how they yell Joe instructors are putting on a character nobody's walking around angry all the time like that you know that don't you sir yes sir if it wasn't gifts like you that would be anything in this world would there sir no sir well now let's just see if there's anything missing that is no different from them to when I went through boot camp in 2006 that is completely accurate there have been many uh people who have gotten their complete footlocker wrecked by a drone trucker I've seen complete rooms wrecked by drill instructors for a towel being at a place or a rack not being made correctly and so if there's a footlocker that was unlocked well we got to see if anything is missing and they are going to dump yours all over the floor and then they're gonna give you like 30 seconds to collect it all and to put it back in the same order usually if it happens the one person it's going to happen to the rest of 'la tuned you do everything as a unit there isn't an individual everything is done as a team and so if one person is getting punished at some point the rest of the - it's gonna get punished so you're only as strong as your weakest link that's sort of the whole idea but uh dro instructors it's actually a really really hard life you don't truckers their first cycle lose an incredible amount of weight I knew one guy who lost literally like 30 pounds inside of three months I mean because it was just non-stop your job is really to make everyone's life miserable and just to go around and yell all the time pause absolutely accurate when he says you have not given private pyle the proper motivation there is a subtext to that he's speaking in code for one jelly doughnut now get on your faces open your mouth their fans for you eat hazing will be disguised by other names such as training or motivation but what they really mean is we need to haze him into compliance and that's what he's really saying there and once got I think it was nine stitches under this eye I wasn't doing a push-up right I got kicked in the face by a private who I out ranked but he had been to Iraq and I hadn't so despite me out ranking him I didn't in terms of the social hierarchy full-metal-jacket overall is is accurate especially for the time so this is occurring during Vietnam full-metal-jacket is probably responsible for recruiting tons of Marines into the Marine Corps it's the movie I watched when when they're thinking about going into the Marine Corps they look at Full Metal Jacket you know or they look at Full Metal Jacket they're like well I'm not gonna go in the Marine Corps gonna go in the Air Force or the Navy you know some of their service there were some egregious moments but most of what I saw is taken from real life and I think when you know when when service members or veterans or you know looking at TV shows are looking at military movies that's sort of what we're looking forward even if that didn't happen to us as long as it falls into the realm of something that could happen or that realm of possibility we'll let it slide but we can't let slide a lot of times is you know ribbons being out of place you know and that's where it's sort of like why didn't you just do a little bit of research before you started writing a script and that's where it drives us insane I'm James LaPorta thank you for watching the breakdown [Music]

Channel: GQ

Views: 12,838,331

Rating: 4.8748841 out of 5

Keywords: breakdown, marine, marines, stripes, us marines, full metal jacket, hacksaw ridge, us marine, the breakdown, marine breaks down, marine breakdown, marine breaks down war movies, war movie, war movies, best war movie, best war movies, most accurate war movies, most accurate war movie, accurate war movie, war scene, war scenes, jarhead, jarhead breakdown, jarhead explained, heartbreak ridge, war movie explained, marine reviews war movies, marine reacts movies, gq, gq magazine

Id: -C3CjOkF-jY

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Bywater]

This shit is so stupid. That said, I appreciate his love of JARHEAD.

Oh, and who is this Charley Brown looking guy?

[u/[deleted]]

File this under: Things Only Marines Would Care About.

With that said I enjoyed it. :-)

[u/Entel7]

Hope the part at 4:45 answers that fuckin' kid's question.

[u/Sanger-Rainsford]

Watched until I heard a “Sir Sandwich” unchecked by this bro.