For Fans of Full Metal Jacket

Kubrick's decision to make the Parris Island sequence feel complete, almost like a short film in itself, is not a structural quirk. It is the thesis. By the time Private Pyle fires that rifle, we have watched the military turn a human being into something else entirely. The second half in Vietnam does not contradict that reading; it confirms it. The soldiers in Hue are not broken men. They are finished products. That is the colder horror.

Yager's 2012 shooter wears Apocalypse Now on its sleeve, but its real ancestor is Full Metal Jacket: it uses the genre's own conventions as the weapon, making players repeat actions they have been rewarded for in other games and then forcing them to look at the results. The famous white phosphorus scene is Kubrick's structural move in controller form. If you finished the film asking what you were supposed to feel, Spec Ops asks the same question with your thumbs on the triggers.

The source novel, The Short-Timers, is shorter and more savage than the film. Hasford served in Vietnam as a combat correspondent and wrote with the clipped, dark humor of someone who had no patience for sentiment. The film softens nothing, but the book is even more compressed. Kubrick and Hasford co-wrote the script with Michael Herr, whose own memoir Dispatches is the other essential document of that war's particular insanity.

David Simon and Ed Burns's 2008 HBO miniseries about the 2003 invasion of Iraq is the closest television has come to Full Metal Jacket's register. It has the same gallows humor, the same institutional absurdism, the same refusal to separate the men from the machine that made them. Based on Evan Wright's embedded journalism, it treats its subjects with the kind of unsentimental respect that never tips into either hero worship or condemnation.