It was the fall of 2004, and I was touring a film set at the studio that was adapting my war memoir, “Jarhead.” The screenwriter walked me onto a soundstage that was supposed to look like my Marine Corps boot-camp barracks. It was small and inconsequential compared with the mighty buildings and squad bays on Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, where I survived grueling training and verbal abuse 16 years earlier. Still, the room gave off an ominous vibe. The drab colors were right. The bunks were tightly cornered. It closely resembled a boot-camp set from a movie I’d watched many times before. A ghost filled the room: Marine Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.

The screenwriter, himself a Marine veteran of the Vietnam era, admitted to me that there was no way the filmmakers could ever top the “Full Metal Jacket” boot-camp sequences that were brought to life so intensely by R. Lee Ermey, a Marine Corps veteran who served two years as a drill instructor in the 1960s. The only thing they could try was homage to a famous scene and its defining character.

It wasn’t just the film world on which Ermey’s character left an impression. The Gunny’s persona saturated military culture, especially that of the Marine Corps. The boys who wanted to serve believed that intimidation and humiliation were essential to the formation of their warrior selves. And drill instructors were happy to oblige.

When the film was released in 1987, I watched it in a theater in Sacramento with a few other knuckleheads who were destined to join the Marine Corps. Because of Stanley Kubrick’s previous work, many viewers expected a purely antiwar film. And they might have seen just that. But what we saw felt beautiful and profane and dangerous — normal American kids transformed into war-ready combatants through barbarism and violence and the best marksmanship training in the world. It was both terrifying and thrilling to watch. I wanted to experience the brutality and humiliation that “Full Metal Jacket” so fully embodied.