"Sir, I got lost on the way to college, sir!" Cynical, pissed off and posturing, 20-year-old Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) can't take his Marine gunnery sergeant seriously. As Jarhead begins, Swoff and his fellow trainees don't know they'll be headed to the Gulf War in a few months. But they're already exhausted.

Anthony Swofford's memoir of that brief encounter in the desert is a smart, sad treatise on war, even though he didn't "see action" per se. The irony of his noncombat combatant status is underlined by Sam Mendes' movie, adapted by Vietnam vet turned historian William Broyles Jr. In the film, as in the book, Swoff remains a spectator, but that hardly absolves him, or leaves him nightmareless. The movie remembers the Gulf conflict as an endless series of traumas that will continue to afflict Swoff and his fellows long after they're home. The problem with war, according to jarhead, is precisely that it is endless. No matter who wins, loss is continuous.

Focused on the absurdism of Desert Storm, the movie can't get at all the other battles in Swofford's book, and so it dispenses with them neatly and perversely. As the camera approaches his moment of conception, during his father's furlough from Vietnam, the hotel door shuts, as do doors on "other things I can't show you": his suicidal sister's institutionalization; his mother bowed over muffins in the kitchen, sobbing; his father silent and turned inward, alone in his own house. Joining the Marines, Swoff seeks sense, maybe a way to fit in. He reads Camus, endures hazing and turns his tragedies into jokes, return fire aimed at the world that won't grant him order or resolution.

In training camp, he becomes a sniper, learning to dote on his gun ("There are many like it, but this one is mine") and love the Corps. Swoff and his spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) believe they want to kill and so they're thrilled when they're sent, along with Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx), to the Saudi desert. Here they are instructed to hydrate and train, masturbate and wait. They play football in their suffocating gas masks, argue amongst themselves, spit prefab answers for the press, and erect a Wall of Shame to their unfaithful girlfriends and spouses back home.

In showing their boredom, jarhead shows their desire for action, their commitment to Marine ideals, that "kicking Iraqi ass" is the means to self-definition. As explained by Lt. Col. Kazinski (Chris Cooper), their current mission is to protect Saudi oil fields; when young Kruger (Lucas Black) wonders about the stability of their cause (assessing their starting point as all the "fat hands in foreign oil," he asks, "Who do you think gave Saddam his weapons?"), Troy sets him straight: "Fuck politics," he says, "We're here. All the rest is bullshit."

Focusing on the moment allows the troops to survive the monotony, as they also anticipate the worst. For most of them, history is a mishmash of movies (they whoop and cheer the Wagner-driven choppers scene in Apocalypse Now, dread and desire to see the homemade sex tape sent by one buddy's wife). Macho and childish, they drink and dance on Christmas, can't imagine the horrors they will behold, when, at last, they're sent to a battleground that's been decimated by the awesome U.S. air war.

Here the film turns poetic and uncanny. Traipsing through the desert until they come upon what became known as the Highway of Death, they look out on charred vehicles and corpses, the top layer of sand burned black beneath their boots. As Swoff leaves his unit to take a dump, his feet leave white prints as he walks up to a blackened body seated, mouth open as if in mid-sentence. Swoff sits nearby, a series of camera angles pairing him with the dead man, so each appears in foreground and background, as if they are conversing. The effect is more harrowing than any battle sequence, underlining jarhead's anguished point: War is not heroic or rousing. It is only devastating.

But if death is the most personal effect of war, it is hardly the foremost motivation. A later sequence strands the men again in the desert, this time made surreal by the burning oil wells, black fluid raining down on them. "The earth is bleeding," declares the lyrically inclined Swoff, but this "blood" is brutal and meaningful, not a life source, not even a means to an end. As they dig into the sand, seeking respite from the downpour, they bicker with one troop who has, Full Metal Jacket-style, taken a corpse as his new friend.

As much as Swoff and Troy try to draw a line between what's decent and what's not, they're lost. The sky is black with oil, the sand drenched, their goggles greased over. Jarhead doesn't lose sight of this basic truth of war. More effective weapons only deepen its despair.

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