What movie most closely resembled your own military experience?

[Aristus]

16. 'Jarhead' and 'Three Kings'.

I was Army, not a Marine, but the film captured a lot of the pointless sitting around in the desert waiting for something to happen.

'Three Kings' captured pretty well the socio-political confusion surrounded the war and its aftermath. My unit was deployed to the Gulf as part of the buildup when it ws still thought that there could be mass-casualties in the ground war, and that trained replacements (especially tank crewmen, of which I was one) would be needed to plug manpower gaps in the line. We ended up not serving in combat, and instead sat around the desert doing bullshit details until we finally got a flight home.

We disliked and distrusted our Saudi allies, thinking them stragglers holding back while the Western coalition did the heavy lifting. At the time, we couldn't fathom George H.W. Bush's decision not to go all the way to Baghdad (a decision I later supported when I learned the relevant facts, and a decision that looked more and more precient in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.) But we thought the end of the war might bring some much-needed stability to the region. We were so naive...