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Five Times Bill Murray’s Film ‘Stripes’ Perfectly Mirrored My Army Experience
I even had a Sergeant Hulka (sort of)
I was a huge fan of war movies long before I joined the Army at 24 (I listed some of my favorites here), and coming from a military family that never shared war stories with me “because I was a civilian,” it was on these films that I based my expectations when I finally joined during the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1990. I went in fully expecting a Full Metal Jacket experience in Basic Training and a cross between Patton and Taps once I reached my permanent duty station. As has been the case for so much of my life, I was completely wrong.
What I found, even when meeting my recruiter prior to actually enlisting, was that if my Army experience resembled any Hollywood film, it was the 1981 Bill Murray classic, Stripes. Impossible, you say? Let me give you five times it was absolutely true.
1. The recruiting office scene. When Bill Murray and Harold Ramis are at the recruiting office, the sergeant there asks them a series of questions, including: “Are either of you homosexual?” Murray and Ramis give each other looks somewhere between accusatory and longing, to which the recruiter says apologetically: “It’s a standard question we have to ask.” Ramis then gives the classic reply: “We’re not homosexual…
