You can’t possibly miss the reference. If you have any interest at all in seeing a film with a title like Jarhead (the half-mocking, half-defiant term Marines use for themselves), you’re going to have seen other films about the experience of military training. And you’re certain to recognize that the opening, in which a line of new arrivals at boot camp are chewed a collective new one by their astonishingly profane drill instructor, is pulled directly from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

On March 9, 1954, there was a largely coincidental trio of events in an expanding, uncoordinated opposition movement against U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the feared and hated anti-communist crusader. In the White House, hidden from public attention and the scrutiny of all but a very few in government, officials in President Eisenhower’s administration were setting in motion a scheme to put a dent in, and perhaps stop, the Wisconsin Republican’s rampage against alleged “subversives” in the U.S. Army.