Marines on the big screen.

"THE MAN FIRES A RIFLE for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward ... he believes he's finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands--love a woman, build a house, change his son's diaper--his hands remember the rifle."--Jarhead

Jarhead, an adaptation of Anthony Swofford's best-selling Desert Storm memoir, is that unusual war film playing in theaters while American soldiers are dying in battle. It's a painful personal journey of one Marine and a muddle of patriotic ardor, bitter cynicism, and brazen machismo.

Dropped into a California boot camp with the ironic sounds of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" on the soundtrack, the clean-cut, blue-eyed Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets smacked across the head repeatedly by a drill instructor. "Swoff" begins to doubt whether signing the Marine Corps contract was such a good idea. Initially content to guzzle laxatives and read Camus' The Stranger in the toilet, Swofford later finds solace in a sniper unit on the eve of its deployment to the Middle East. After taking his first shots on the firing range, says Swofford, "I was hooked."

Once he has gone through the movie cliche of basic training--the screaming sergeant, the multicultural platoon, the agonizing exercises--director Sam Mendes (American Beauty and Road to Perdition) quickly dispatches the platoon to the sand-strewn reaches of Saudi Arabia where the mission, as Lieutenant Colonel Kazinski (Chris Cooper) bellows to the troops via bullhorn, is to protect the oil fields of "the House of Saud."

Once there, a startling scene reveals the disturbing mob mentality of recruits aching for combat. Creatively adapted from the book, the sequence shows a platoon watching the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter attack from Apocalypse Now. Jarheads scream in anticipation of the helicopters' strafing of the seaside village: "Shoot the motherfuckers," yells Gyllenhaal's Swofford.

Rather than illustrate the bloodthirsty insanity of war, as director Francis Ford Coppola might have intended, war movies act as a stimulant, the real-life Swofford explains, hyping up soldiers for battle.

"Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man," he writes in the book. "With film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck."

Portions of this film, too, make war--or at least this war--look kind of fun. "Are we ever going to get to kill somebody?" asks one Marine. Jamie Foxx's Staff Sergeant Sykes is more jocular than abusive; the Marines play practical jokes, get drunk, sing and dance and bond--it's as much frat party as combat zone.

But Jarhead eventually discloses war's horrors. As the platoon marches towards Kuwait, the Marines stumble upon a nightmare traffic jam of collateral damage: bombed out buses, cars and trucks, and then the bodies--the ones that Americans back home never see--charred, burned, and blackened figures. A Marine murmurs in shock, "They were trying to get away." In one of the movie's significant departures from the book, these dead are not Iraqi military, but mostly civilian refugees.

Then the black fog rolls in--the Kuwaiti oil fields are ignited--and Jarhead descends into an inferno. The sky turns dark, unleashing droplets of oil, and the soldiers wallow in a slippery bog of crude-soaked dunes. And out of this living hell, in the film's most surreal and haunting moment, trots a horse caked in oil, letting out a slight, frightened whinny.

"Every war is different; every war is the same," says Gyllenhaal's Swofford. And he's right. His Gulf War has little to do with the current Iraq War. The guerrilla-style fighting in Iraq's urban and small-town jungles is nothing like the four-day Desert Storm ground campaign.

And yet, this one Marine's experience--the training, indoctrination, and thrill of the imminent kill--connects him to past soldiers and past wars. "All the jarheads, killing and dying, will always be me," says the Swofford character back home, a ravaged combat veteran who never even fired a single shot in battle, and yet whose hands will never forget the grip of his rifle.

Anthony Kaufman writes about film for The Village Voice, Variety, Time Out New York, and indie WIRE.