What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

You know Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket? He was apparently meant to be a bad drill sergeant all this time. Looking through the TVTropes page on the film, R. Lee Ermey, who was apparently very good at his job in real life, deliberately played Hartman as a very bad one who only stayed on the job because he stayed just close enough to the rules to not get caught.

What's legitimately surprising is that while looking for specifics, it's really bloody hard to sort through the question of "did he suck at his job" through answers of "My drill sergeant was really this much of a hardass" or "what he did wouldn't fly today," which doesn't answer the question of "by the admittedly probably low standards of Parris Island in 1967, what is he doing wrong?" To be fair, given that most soldiers don't get the chance to go through basic more than once, it's hard to get the sort of experience necessary to compare and figure out what makes a good drill sergeant. 

Apparently, he was far more physically abusive to the recruits than was accepted (the sort of humiliating beatdowns he gives wouldn't fly, and the most that would be permitted would be a short, sharp, shock for attention's sake, although even that was never officially condoned by the top brass), and his book counterpart was even worse and even gave one recruit a lemon swirly. Also, he apparently wouldn't actually have interacted much with the recruits, leaving that to the Junior DIs who are essentially scenery in the film.

Of course, I could really see this from scenes like this:



Praising a mass murderer while his victims were barely cold. I'd say yikes, but then again, he also praises Lee Harvey Oswald, and I don't know what's worse, the fact that he's praising the assassin of the most consistently popular President of his lifetime, or that he's praising his marksmanship when it was actually shockingly poor. I know that there's a lot of people who claimed Oswald was a mediocre shot who managed to get an extremely lucky shot. The more I look into it, this perception is exactly backwards. The issues of his marksmanship scores aside (which I'm not even sure how to interpret, because some sources claim the scale used starts at 190 and ends at 250 for whatever reason), he was using a rifle with a 4x scope at 88 yards, which means JFK's head should have covered the scope. Meanwhile, we have a missed shot, one shot that grazed the neck, and one off-center head shot. Which should have been a hell of a lot easier. And the issue of poor taste aside, that's the sort of marksmanship he's lionising? 

And, naturally, this scene:



I don't know how true this was in 1967, but Gunny would have had to notice the signs that Gomer Pyle was losing his mind. The book explains this because the troop's already lost a couple recruits and he doesn't want yet another washout, and the movie could easily be explained as "Hey, I'm getting results and that's what matters." But his actions in this scene are inexcusably stupid; he's got a crazed recruit pointing a fully loaded weapon at him and instead of calling the MPs to take him away and Section 8 him before sunrise, he walks up to him and keeps insulting him. And naturally, he gets shot in the chest for his stupidity.



And, of course, here's a guess at what would have gone down if that scene happened IRL.