SPOILER ADVISORY: If you haven’t seen Full Metal Jacket, watch it before reading this article. Watch it if you don’t read this article. If you’ve already seen it, watch it again whether you read the article or not.

The casualties of the Vietnam War went beyond soldiers and civilians. The geopolitical morass engulfed journalists, novelists and correspondents trying to get the information out of jungles, rice paddies and cities under siege. Filmmakers trying to untangle the truths in hindsight were swallowed by the scope of the collective trauma of the conflict. Martin Sheen almost gave his heart to play in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Bitter partisan rivalries erupted from the camps of Coming Home and Deerhunter. But Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is one of the most horrifying glimpses into war ever captured on celluloid. Like many great films, it was as much a runaway train wreck as the war itself.

Kubrick held throughout his life that education was meaningless, but his films are as much history lessons as they are historic. He hired aerospace experts to help design his 2001: A Space Oddessy, creating an atmosphere so realistic that some people today believe he faked the 1969 moon landing on a back lot (those people are of course morons). Kubrick is a mythical storyteller but the stories about him are just as mythic.

The 1987 war movie Full Metal Jacket looms large in the Kubrick legends. It is a classic film which was constantly on the verge of derailment during production which continued running long after the tracks ran out. The movie began as an adaptation of a book and is the subject of a book. Full Metal Jacket Diary, written by Matthew Modine, who played Jokerman the film, takes some of the myth out of the legendary director, while playing into the very stories that made him legendary.