"Here come the man with the look in his eye
Fed on nothing but full of pride
Look at them go, look at them kick
Makes you wonder how the other half live"
--INXS
The last couple episodes of On The Inside I've happen to have seen have been Marine oriented. Tonight's was on the school for the M1A1 Main Battle Tank. The others were their series on Parris Island.
I'm normally disappointed by the presentation of boot camp, whether in fictional cinema or educational documentary. And I was not disappointed by this latest series, meaning, of course, that I was. However realistic the action captured, it is impossible to capture the relentlessness of it - the pervasiveness of it that is all-encompassing. The old cliché of seconds stretching into hours comes to mind, but it's quite misleading. Seconds were seconds, nothing more. There was just an endless stream of them, and it was doubtful whether you would get - or wanted to get - from one to the next.
But I digress. An interesting thing both specials had in common was that they were both filmed over September 11, 2001. For me, at least, both boot camp (Parris Island) and infantry school (Camp Geiger) were informational black holes.
People measure time as a sequence of interrelated events. How many of you can track the passing of your years by Top 40 songs, sports accomplishments, people you've dated, or Perl versions? Much of 1991 is "lost" to me because I cannot put anything in context.
So it was very interesting to see these recruits and Marines trying to contextualize the terrorist attacks. (And interesting to see how the Corps handled the situation from a training perspective.)
