I saw “Jarhead” last fortnight. I read the book in preparation. Actually my partner had got it about 18 months ago from a pulp bookshop, because he’s interested in war and the people who make it.

In the book, Anthony Swofford doesn’t glorify, and doesn’t condemn. He admits that he did the things he did, and tries to tell the truth of his experience. He’s critical, he’s analytical. He’s honest in a way that the film could have been, but isn’t. The book talks about young marines in training watching endless war movies, pumping themselves up, stroking their ‘dicks’ readying themselves for ‘the big fuck of war’, and each man taking a turn to go out into the hallway and cry to himself at the fear and excitement he felt. The film just shows the dick-stroking part, not the lonliness, soul-searching, questioning and fear. Just the excitation.

The film is a lie. In the book, there’s a discussion about the “Shame Wall” where marines post pics of their lovers who cheat on them back home, and how that makes them feel better, to bond as brothers on a frontier. But marine recruiters will use their exhaustive knowledge of the price of prostitutes at any point on the globe to entice young men into the corps. There’s a little contradiction there - a dialectic, even. One that might be too complex for cinema-goers to absorb. Our buff and sexy hero is shown to be a celibate and faithful boyfriend (as are all the marines) while he fantasises about his girlfriend’s dalliances with some “Jody” back home. (”Jody” is the mythic man who didn’t enlist and fucks everyone’s girlfriends). The book describes a complex relationship between women and their marine-men. Some of them get off on having a man away at war, some of them have affairs to ‘get even’ with the men for use and abuse of prostitutes. Real-life Swofford has his affairs, but eventually rejects his girlfriend when she does the same, pasting her onto the wall of shame and trying to sell his nudie pics of her. He can’t because an unfaithful woman just isn’t wank-material, even though all of the marines are unfaithful in thoguht and deed to their own women.

Our hero is a hard man, but the film doesn’t explore that he’s also a soft man who’s capable of laying out his contradictions for inspection. In his book, Swofford says that all war films, especially the “anti-war” ones are actually pro-war because they indulge and pamper the warring desire. Jarhead had the chance to rise above that, but didn’t. Why would you try to actually say something when you can just show Jake Gyllenhall’s buff body in the shower?