In early 2018, R. Lee Ermey, the actor who plays Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, passed away, prompting a public reminiscence of his performance in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. Although to many viewers Hartman is a plainly atrocious character, one who sadistically and unnecessarily drives Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence past the brink of sanity, to others he is something like a folk hero, looming especially large in military circles, where many service members still elevate him as the ultimate role model.
Anthony Swofford, author of the 2003 Iraq War memoir Jarhead, published a piece in The New York Times after R. Lee Ermey's death describing this phenomenon. There, Swofford describes how Ermey's persona "saturated military culture," and created a mystique around the United States Marine Corps that lured men in, rather than pushed them away. "I wanted to experience the brutality and humiliation that Full Metal Jacket so fully embodied," Swofford remembers. "Hartman had hooked us."
Swofford and many others deem Ermey's performance as Hartman as "one of the most recognizable characters in movie history," one that has exceeded the limits of the film to inform the very culture of the Marines that the film was seeking to address and perhaps critique. After the release of Full Metal Jacket, life began to imitate art, as recruits began to expect the kind of treatment to which Ermey-as-Hartman subjects his privates. As Swofford explains, many hopeful Marines fully anticipated and even perversely longed for the "coded racism, physical abuse, and psychological hazing," that were necessary to become a real man, "born again hard."
