Some wars are unavoidable and need well be fought, but this doesn’t erase warfare’s waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose son’s die horribly. This will never end. Sorry.

If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there’s no use continuing such behavior when you’re dead.

I'd never talked about it, ... I'd left the Marine Corps when I was 22 ... and I really left.

I don't think so, ... What we fell in love with was the idea of combat, and this movie doesn't really give you what those movies did. It doesn't give you exploding body parts and gore the way 'Saving Private Ryan' or 'Platoon' did. It's more interior.

I never saw it as a political book, ... I wanted to open up a world that people might not know anything about. It's up to the people who go to this movie to decide how they feel about it, just like it's their job as Americans to decide how they feel about the war. We're asking the viewer to take responsibility for how they feel.

I love Jake's performance, ... It's thoughtful, introspective, rough, brash, conflicted ... and those are things that I was. Through the combination of having read the book, Bill's script and Sam's direction, he really captured that young 20-year-old Marine at war with many things.

It's a young man's education. It's character-driven. It's warfare through this singular point of view, a confusing, scary, sometimes exciting situation that will define him for the rest of his life.

War is always seductive, ... 'Full Metal Jacket' didn't make me want to join the Marines. I already had fallen in love with the idea of combat. I think whether somebody feels that about our movie is subjective. It depends on the viewer. I got letters from people who said 'I was thinking about joining up and I read your book and now I can't wait' and I got letters from people who said 'I was thinking about joining up and I read your book and now I'm going to go to college.'

We watched 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Full Metal Jacket' before we went to war. It was pornography for us. They opened up this historical and psychological narrative. This is what men do when they go to war, we thought. It's a received image of war through film.

Writing the book helped exorcise all of that, ... Many years later, I'm happy that I didn't have that chance for a sniper kill.