Five Times Bill Murray’s Film ‘Stripes’ Perfectly Mirrored My Army Experience
I even had a Sergeant Hulka (sort of)
I was a huge fan of war movies long before I joined the Army at 24 (I listed some of my favorites here), and coming from a military family that never shared war stories with me “because I was a civilian,” it was on these films that I based my expectations when I finally joined during the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1990. I went in fully expecting a Full Metal Jacket experience in Basic Training and a cross between Patton and Taps once I reached my permanent duty station. As has been the case for so much of my life, I was completely wrong.
What I found, even when meeting my recruiter prior to actually enlisting, was that if my Army experience resembled any Hollywood film, it was the 1981 Bill Murray classic, Stripes. Impossible, you say? Let me give you five times it was absolutely true.
1. The recruiting office scene. When Bill Murray and Harold Ramis are at the recruiting office, the sergeant there asks them a series of questions, including: “Are either of you homosexual?” Murray and Ramis give each other looks somewhere between accusatory and longing, to which the recruiter says apologetically: “It’s a standard question we have to ask.” Ramis then gives the classic reply: “We’re not homosexual, but we are willing to learn.”
My recruiter asked this question as well, but the one he focused on was clearly much more pressing for him. In one quick breath he said: “Have you ever smoked marijuana? Say no.” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right and asked him to repeat the question. He did, the same way: “Have you ever smoked marijuana. Say no.” Already good at taking orders, I said no. He sighed with relief, checked the box, and whispered that I had just saved him a lot of extra paperwork. This was my introduction to what life would be like for the next four years.
2. The get acquainted huddle. In the film, once they are at Basic Training, the platoon is gathered around telling stories about their backgrounds and why they joined the Army, all of which are hilarious. Check it out below.
When I first saw this scene, I was sure it was simply Ramis (he co-wrote the screenplay) playing the whole things for laughs, as there was no way the Army was letting this group of knuckleheads defend the country. Then I had my own huddle at lovely Ft. Sill, Oklahoma (it’s a garden spot; be sure to go in winter like I did, when the temps are a balmy 10 degrees).
My platoon consisted of several former/current gang members (both Crips and Bloods) who figured Iraq was safer than Chicago, three drug dealers who had joined as a plea bargain to avoid prison sentences (I think they stopped that practice in the early ‘90s), a bunch of guys who wanted to avoid working in Appalachian mills like dad and granddad before them, and then idiots like me, who were at a state in life where voluntarily becoming cannon fodder seemed better than any other option available (my car had died the day Saddam invaded Kuwait and I couldn’t afford to fix it, plus how often do you get advance warning of a war coming?). In hindsight, the Stripes crew was far better military material than any of us.
3. The bar scene. In the film, after their drill sergeant (the awesomely named Sergeant Hulka, played expertly by Warren Oates), is injured in a training accident, the platoon heads off to a bar in town that features female mud wrestling, free-flowing alcohol, and general debauchery. For me this did not happen in Basic (they had locked away all our civilian clothes upon arrival), but from Medic school in San Antonio through the day I left the service I spent more time in bars than I ever did on the parade field and consumed the equivalent of Lake Michigan in adult beverages. There may still be an Army in the world where you live like Spartan warrior monks, but it’s not the American one.
4. “We’re watching a truck.” All of the recruiting videos, especially during the “Be All You Can Be” advertising slogan era I grew up in, show the Army as the most exciting career choice you can ever make. This may indeed be true during actual combat, but the rest of the time involves a lot of the most boring activities you could imagine. In the film, this is shown when Murray and Ramis are in beautiful Italy, sitting in an airplane hangar guarding the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle.
For me, my normal duties included spending eight hours a day in the motor pool performing maintenance on the M-113 Personnel Carriers that served as our ambulances. Remember that I was a medic, not a mechanic, yet I came out of active duty far more able to change hydraulic fluid than to correctly insert an IV needle. One fun change of pace was “grass guard,” an essential duty that occurred when the Sergeant Major caught some careless soul stepping on the sacred grass outside his office. You would stand at attention guarding the grass until another hapless soldier made the same mistake and had to replace you. He only caught me once; four hours at attention in 95-degree heat with 90% humidity (this was in South Georgia) taught a memorable lesson.
5. The officers, my lord the officers. Mocking the utter incompetence of officers (as opposed to the brilliance of the NCOs) is a fairly common trope in films about the military. In Stripes, the foil is Captain Stillman, played by John Larroquette in one of the funniest performances of his career.
Surely I didn’t encounter anything close to this in real life, right? Wrong. From the captain who nearly killed me because he was playing with a live grenade to the lieutenant who crashed his bicycle saluting me with his right hand while holding a bag with his left (when he saluted, he no longer had either hand on the handlebars), much of the officer corps I encountered was less than inspiring. In an occurrence eerily similar to the one in which Sergeant Hulka is injured, while we were engaged in war games in the Mojave Desert, I had a lieutenant call in an artillery strike on our own vehicle because he couldn’t read a damn map. Thank God were only simulating live-fire or I would not be typing this right now.
(Here’s a quick bit of movie nerd trivia for you. In the scene above, the soldier to whom John Larroquette says “fire the weapon” is a very young Timothy Busfield; they would star together in The West Wing 20 years after Stripes).
Bonus: my own Sergeant Hulka. I realize this makes six things rather than five, but I mentioned sort of having my own Sergeant Hulka in the subtitle, thus I have to include him. So he does not track me down and kill me if he somehow finds and reads this, I will call him Sergeant Hammer, and he was my Senior Drill Instructor. Like Hulka, he had fought in Vietnam and had little faith in the soldiers the country was churning out at the time.
He once told a younger drill sergeant who was wearing a Combat Infantryman’s Badge from his service in the 1989 Panama invasion that he (Hammer) had been shot at more the last time he was home in Detroit than the sergeant had been in Panama. Savage. He went so far as to tell my dad at the end of Basic Training that if the Bangladeshi Army knew how prepared we really were they would have invaded by now. Ouch.
But like Hulka, he had a soft side, too. A week before graduation from Basic Training I had a severe reaction to the gamma globulin injection they gave us in anticipation of deployment to Iraq (the war would end the day I graduated Basic, but they had no way of knowing that). If I went to the post doctor, they would have likely hospitalized me and then “recycled” me; this meant I would graduate weeks later with a platoon where I knew no one and would not go on to Medic School with guys I had trained with for months.
Rather than do this, Hammer let me stay in bed for almost two days, with a nurse he was dating at the time checking up on me regularly; he said if the fever did not break by the end of the second day, I was off to the hospital. It may not have been the most medically wise decision, but he was hardcore. The fever did break, I graduated with my class, and served with some of those guys from Basic through the day I left the Army. I’m still friends will several to this day, all because of Sergeant Hammer.
I joined expecting a Band of Brothers experience, and in the end I got it. I just never expected that experience to be more Stripes than Full Metal Jacket, and those brothers to be more like Bill Murray than John Wayne.
