Richard summed it up as well as I could have…if not better. I recommend his book
Gulf War Chronicles.
I was in the 1st Infantry Division of the US Army and "Yes" we had to take the pills, I took them myself and may even still have some amongst my stuff from way back then.
Jarhead only showed you the supposed experience of those few Marines as opposed to the rest of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and other Coalition forces. I for one saw.....oooooh about a million times more "war" than the movie Jarhead depicted. Watch some of the other movies out about Desert Storm for some additional ideas of what it was like (
Courage Under Fire and
Three Kings are the ones that come to mind right off). Understand that even those movies leave out lots and lots of details and lots of examples of what it was really like. There were days when I saw dozens and dozens of destroyed Iraqi military vehicles (tanks, artillery, BMP's, transports, and so on) not to mention the hundreds of AK-47's laying all over the place for us to just run over when Iraqi soldiers surrendered to US Forces and just dropped their weapons where they stood and walked away.
I saw so much more death than Jarhead showed and their depiction of the daytime was significantly different than what I remember. My unit was on the edge of the oil fields (within 1/4 mile) and while we had an oily substance on most everything, we weren't covered in it like they were in the movie....but then again that was us. The next unit might have been soaked in it.
I sit here and remember one time trailing 2/16 Inf, 3/37 and 4/37 Armor at about 2 miles after a major tank battle, this would have been within the first 1-2 days of the ground war. We passed tanks that had been hit within minutes before we came through. Tanks on fire, tanks with secondary explosions from the unexploded tank rounds inside going off. I saw many tanks with the turrets either blowing off or having already blown off. I saw tanks and artillery half buried to help hide them that our tanks still destroyed.
These pics were taken on the Road to Basrah, about 1/4 mile away from what was nicknamed "The Highway of Death" just outside Safwan later in the day of the cease fire:
I took some pics of a Russian made ZSU-23 that I got a chance to climb in but the pics did not turn out. This thing looked brand spanking new and hadn't been painted to match the desert colors yet. It was still light gray, the seats weren't torn, none of the gauges were broken...I bet this thing hadn't seen any service other than driving to wear it got abandoned.
It was located only a few yards from the tanks above.
Read through threads within this website,
http://www.gulfwarvets.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi
http://www.gulfweb.org/ and so on and you can piece together your own mental picture of what went on over there.
Dagger X-Ray - ARMY
(12/91 - present) - miss the service
(9/90 - 12/91) 2nd Bde
1st Infantry Division - Desert Shield / Desert Storm Combat VET
(9/88 - 9/90) C-17th Signal Battalion of 22nd Signal Brigade - Sachsenhausen Bar Scene VET
(4/88 - 9/88) AIT Fort Gordon, Ga
(12/87 - 3/88) Basic Training Fort Jackson, SC
"People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
-George Orwell
"I am a soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight."
- General George Patton