Gustav Hansford

wrote The Short Timers, aka Full Metal Jacket, and The Phantom Blooper.

-- unfortunately they're out of print, but there's a website dedicated to him, www.gustavhasford.com. , where you can read most of his prose.

some of what i read, including this in particular, was pretty goddamn insightful:

"Like a woman who has never given birth, the man who has not faced death and inflicted death will for all of his life feel somehow not quite complete. Combat veterans are completely puzzled and bemused by the strangers who try to start fistfights with veterans in bars to prove how tough they are. Macho civilians envy the veteran for something the veteran, or at least some veterans, would be only too happy to transfer, or get rid of, like bad memories, or a plastic leg.

The soldier's war comes and goes, and ends. But noncombatants search endlessly for substitutes for war and attach to war that esoteric glamor which always attaches itself to the unattainable...

Veterans quickly learn that the fantasies of aspiring war heroes and the realities of the experiences of war, what you gain for a short time and what you lose forever, can never be bridged."

- The Phantom Blooper, 1990

i know, sounds like a bunch of Veteran bravado, but we're granted that, i think, @ least.

Gustav Hansford is dead now.

i'd have liked to have met him.