With Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on the horizon, Swofford is shipped off to Saudi Arabia as a member of an elite sniper squad. Upon their arrival, the Marines endure a ruthless training regimen under the watch of Staff Sergeant Sykes (a wickedly comical Jaime Foxx) in preparation for the battle ahead. "You will train, you will hydrate," proclaims a commanding officer, "and you will maintain a constant state of suspicious alertness."
The soldiers train. They hydrate. But the battle never comes. Isolated in the monotonous desert, the soldiers can only kill time. They cry over photos of unfaithful girlfriends. They drink. They masturbate. When a crew of reporters inquires about their biohazard equipment, the company plays a game of football in gasmasks. What they never do, however, is fight. Even when the war begins, the soldiers march on and on without ever seeing combat. At one point, a squad of American fighter planes actually fires on them, having mistaken them for Iraqis. This mishap highlights their insignificance in a war from which they have been so cruelly excluded. When a Marine is castigated for discovering and then toying with the corpse of an Iraqi soldier, he protests: "What have we done? We didn't kill them!" Though they stumble upon carnage, the Marines do so not as warriors, but as spectators.
At the film's climax, Swofford and his partner Troy (a characteristically stone-faced Peter Sarsgaard) are ordered to abandon their sniper mission in favor of an air strike, even as their target stands within their crosshairs. When Troy breaks down and pleads for a chance to take his shot, what becomes apparent is that these young men will never see action and that even in the Marines their existence is bereft of meaning and direction.
If one scene epitomizes the surreal atmosphere of director Sam Mendes' Oscar-winning "American Beauty," it is undoubtedly the film's infamous rose petal montage. Mendes' talent for strangely affecting visuals is strong in his latest film as well. In one scene, the soldiers make camp within breath of flaming oil wells that streak violently up through blackened air and literally rain down petrol; in another, a returned Swofford gazes out a window, his silhouette cut between two visions-the trailer park where he now resides to his left, the Kuwaiti desert to his right. Mendes' visions pack an unexpected punch, and are in turn beautiful, terrible and profoundly lonely.
Viewers intent on deriving from "Jarhead" some political statement may be disappointed. To the extent that it is told from the sole perspective of the immemorial soldier, the story is necessarily free of any such calculations (as Sarsgaard's character proclaims: "Fuck politics. We're here. All the rest is bullshit"). Although Mendes declines to articulate any political motivation, "Jarhead" is far from vacuous. While the film's sardonic wit may seem at times more sarcastic than intelligent, more nihilistic than philosophical, "Jarhead" is an intensely dark and haunting account, the cumulative effect of which is unmistakable. Critics have berated the film as ambivalent and seem desirous of a portrayal that is either satirical (in the tradition of George Clooney's "Three Kings") or that frames war within chaotic and penetrative violence (à la Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down"). It is true that Mendes' approach raises more questions than it answers (do we empathize with these unfulfilled soldiers, or condemn the culture that has instilled their urge to violent release?). The uniquely novel hell of "Jarhead" is found not in bloodshed but in tedium and absurd impotence, and this is precisely that which makes the film compelling.
As "Jarhead" begins, Swofford reads from Albert Camus' "The Stranger." By the film's end, this literary reference seems entirely appropriate, for "Jarhead" speaks ultimately, not of politics or even of war, but of an existential and lonely helplessness that is timeless and overwhelming. As our protagonist remarks upon his return from Kuwait, "We're all still in the desert."