Few audiences can have watched Jarhead, the film about an American marine in the first Gulf war, more intently than that at Camp Ripper, a base in western Iraq filled with thousands of marines.
But there will also be few places on Earth where it is so reviled.
Sam Mendes, its British director, has explained how, by bringing Anthony Swofford's autobiography to the screen, he hoped to expose the barbarity of military life...
Being a marine can be brutal, the men at Ripper admit. Boot camp was not pleasant and, although incidents of sergeants physically attacking their men when they muck up are rare now, older hands say that they were relatively common in 1991, when the film is set.
But unlike the action on screen, the violence is normally constrained by discipline, the marines say. That restraint is part of their professionalism - and is meant to keep them alive.
Aim a gun at a friend and threaten to kill him, a soldier said, and you face jail and a dishonourable discharge, not a few words of complaint from your corporal...
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