I hate war movies, but I love Full Metal Jacket. People forget it’s a war movie; they get taken in by the flash and drama of the first half and R. Lee Ermey’s cruel but clever drill instructor. I’ve met people who stop the movie halfway through, unconcerned with how the new Marines deal with the pressures of Vietnam. When I saw it the first time, I loved Joker and wasn’t concerned with why. In my forties, I understand: I love how he reflects parts of me back to me.
I’ve always liked to play in competing sides of the sandbox.
At nineteen, I was a ripped-clothes-studded-jacket punk. I was a dirty-venue-with-a-five-dollar-cover punk. A 5’2” girl-in-the-mosh-pit punk. A political punk. I had a t-shirt that said “Bush and Gore Make Me Wanna Ralph.” I was detained for harassing the cops at a local Republican event. I was majoring in political science, thinking I was going to do something big. I was part of an anarcho-communist group on the internet–this was pre-Reddit, but almost certainly as tedious. The other thing I did?
I joined the Marines.
I think my actions were supposed to suggest something about the duality of man, or woman, as it were.
The major problem for me in joining the Marine Corps was my longstanding issues with authority. I could work hard, operate well under stress, take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’, and understand that it was the drill instructor’s job to be as heinous to me as possible. But follow orders? That part was harder.
The Marine Corps loves a little rebellion. We worship at the altar of Chesty Puller, who was rumored to have at least 11 non-judicial punishments and famously said that if the USMC wanted us to behave, “they wouldn’t challenge [us] with a good conduct medal.” In boot camp, however, rebellion is not as prized.
Boot camp is surreal by design. It looks like every movie you’ve seen about it, and smells a lot worse (Parris Island, in particular, has a very specific swampy smell I’ve never encountered anywhere else). They replace common words with made-up shit you’ll never hear again outside the fenceline.
Pens were ink sticks, flashlights were moonbeams, and your shoes were either go-fasters or tenny-runners (I envy the Marines who got to have go-fasters; if my sneakers had to have a goofy name, at least let it be something 9-year-old me would think was cool). This was also a world where the slightest deviation resulted in everybody getting their shit thrown all over the floor or all of us sweating it out in a sand pit. And if there wasn’t a slight deviation, that was okay, because the drill instructors would invent one.
The very first intrusive thought I ever had was in boot camp, and it was because of Full Metal Jacket. Today, “intrusive thoughts” are a big deal on social media, where it means finally getting bangs because you really, really want bangs. I experience them as an undeniable and nearly irresistible urge to do something really fucking dangerous. We were all standing at attention with the DI walking up and down the squad bay calling us heifers, or some other very cliché but undeniably on-brand insult. The surreality–the unreality of all of it came crashing in on me. The only thing I could process was the undeniable and nearly irresistible urge to impersonate Pvt. Joker.
It was too much. I got through boot camp because I knew it was all an act. I knew the DIs practiced yelling at us; they practiced what they were going to say. I knew they didn’t dump the foot lockers on the floor because we actually, genuinely sucked, but because it was on the schedule that day. So, she’s pacing up and down the squad bay, insulting us as a group, insulting us as individuals, and it was too much like the scene in Full Metal Jacket, where they introduce Ermey’s drill instructor. I stopped being able to hear what she was saying, stopped being able to separate the playacting in front of me from the movies I watched at home.
In the scene I was thinking of, or temporarily living in, the DI is in the middle of saying awful, racist shit to a recruit when Joker, as yet unnamed, says from the other side of the squad bay, “Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?” Ermey’s DI thinks someone else said it and rains Hell on him. Unable to watch another recruit take the heat, he admits it was him and earns his nickname.
Every single cell in my body was telling me to put on a fake drawl and do it. Every single cell in my body also knew that if I did that, not only would I be absolutely destroyed, but we would all pay, and I would never be forgiven. Because thrashing us didn’t have to be on the schedule. If one of us fucked up, they made the time.
Eventually, the DI would dismiss us for the night and go into the hut. Eventually, I would not be standing at attention in a scene from the all-female reboot of Full Metal Jacket. I would be safely back in what passed for reality, lying in my bunk, trying to ignore the scratchy blankets. If I could just make it another few minutes, I’d be safe.
The only problem was, in the context of this intrusive thought, time ceased to exist.
I was losing it, cracking from the inside out. The words were bubbling up in my physical body, ready to spray everywhere like a shaken-up soda can. If I didn’t say it, I would go absolutely bug-fuck crazy. I mean, cartoon crazy. The old cartoons, where going crazy meant the body contorting, twisting, jumping, changing shape, laughing, screaming.
I was going to say the line from Full Metal Jacket, or I was going to go full fucking Daffy Duck.
I’ve never felt an intrusive thought so powerfully since. And I do have them. I’ve never followed through on any of them, and none of them have taken me over so completely. I’ve never felt the physical sensation of going nuts before or since.
Mercifully, the DI dismissed us. I told the recruit next to me what I’d been dealing with, but she didn’t seem to “get it.” She must have had a normal or, at least, more realistic relationship with authority. She almost certainly had a better grip on reality. We got through the night, and I continued to hold back the wave of crazy by doing stupid little shit like wiggling my toes inside my boots so I could tell myself I was still punk rock.
Anyway, I made it. I finished the ultimate event, the Crucible, with a stress fracture in my pelvis and god-knows-what happening in my iliotibial band. The first time I went to a show post-boot camp, the pit started up and I had the sudden realization that, 19 years old or not, I was mortal and I could be hurt. I didn’t get into another moshpit until 2021, which I managed to survive unharmed.
When I left the Marine Corps, I happily put it aside and moved on. I didn’t have the best time, and I didn’t have the worst. I didn’t think it was a defining part of what made me “me.” Everyone knew I was punk, though. I still considered myself punk last year when I listened to almost nothing but Sturgill Simpson for 12 months straight. I am a punk rocker. I have a punk haircut, I’m covered in tattoos, and I’ve got holes in my face. I look like a forty-one-year-old punk.
On the other hand, if I asked you to close your eyes and picture a Marine Corps veteran, it wouldn’t look like me. I’m not a dude, first of all. If I asked you what you thought the average veteran thought about our current political climate, I probably wouldn’t check a whole lot of your boxes. Hell, if I asked you what kind of music you thought veterans listened to, you might say country, but you definitely wouldn’t say Sturgill Simpson.
Calling myself a veteran got mixed reactions. So, I didn’t call myself one. I didn’t stand up at events that asked all veterans to stand. I didn’t want to deal with people side-eyeing me or coming up later to remind me that being married to a servicemember didn’t make me a part of the military.
Eventually, the fact that I don’t look like a veteran started to get on my fucking nerves. When I tried to buy a house using my VA Loan, my realtor insisted I did not rate one. We argued for a solid ten minutes before she finally said, “Spouses are not entitled to VA benefits!” When I told her I was a veteran, she didn’t even apologize. At the VA hospital, I walked past the giant motto that talked about their responsibilities to the men who served, only to be called “Mister Pickup” when it was my turn to be seen. I met women who waited years, and sometimes even decades, to get help because they didn’t think they “counted.”
Okay, wait. I lied to you.
I said, “I didn’t have the worst time,” which, I suppose, is technically true. People definitely had a worse time than I did. I also said, “I moved on,” which is a bold-faced lie.
In 2016, my husband sat me down and told me I needed to get screened for PTSD.
A fun-filled year of bullshit and paperwork later, I won my prize. The US government told me exactly what they thought my trauma was worth. A percentage that translates to an actual dollar value. Whether I liked it or not, being a veteran is a part of who I am because it literally altered my brain.
So, back to those other women veterans. Women who served and were putting off getting help for years or even decades because they didn’t think of themselves as veterans is an indictment on the entire military system. It’s an indictment on our so-called “brothers” in arms who, at best, don’t advocate for us and, at worst, are the source of our harm. And it’s an indictment on the government that pretends to care about veterans but forgets that women have served in the military for over 100 years.
And it’s an indictment on me for thinking I was too fucking cool to call myself a veteran.
Because I am a motherfucking veteran. Every time I don’t say I’m a veteran because someone else pictures a blonde white guy in my place, I let another woman sit through her military sexual trauma alone. I let another woman wait to get her hips checked out at the VA hospital, thinking her injury doesn’t “count” because it’s due to an ill-fitting pack the military knows injures women, and not a combat injury.
I doubled and tripled down on calling myself a veteran when I saw how we are used to score political points. They love to tell you what we think, as though we all agree. The military might put us in uniforms that strip us of our identity, but I’m an individualist to my core. I’m a punk rocker, right?
Full Metal Jacket is based on a novel called Short Timers that I’m always telling myself I’ll read. There’s a sequel, where I’ve been told Joker picks a side. He’s no longer living in his duality, honoring it, inspiring Marines like me – the outsiders among the outsiders. I don’t have any urge to read that one. I want to keep living in the duality of being human, trying both sides of every coin. Because it turns out, altered brain or not, being a Marine is a defining characteristic of what makes me, me. And so is punk, and a hundred or more other things.
I like to think that, in the punk community, we look out for the little guy, the underrepresented. Women Marines are called a lot of things, most of which I won’t repeat, but we’re also called “The Fewer and Prouder.” When I joined, less than one percent of the Marine Corps were women. So I did it, I made it, I’ve got some scars to show. But the punk in me won’t let the woman veteran in me stay quiet. It’s, as Joker said, “something about the duality of man, the Jungian thing.”
