Wuss in Actuality
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The story is told from the vantage of "Joker" and emanates from his strictly non military approach to service and the marines. I'll sit there doing something and then find myself compelled to stop seconds before something outrageous in the movie transpires.
It seems I have the high points all memorized, much like I did the movie Aliens during that nether yea of my existence teaching college.
Perhaps I was fantasizing about doing to the enemy what the corps did to the character Leonard aka "Gomer Pyle" — the foil upon whom the brunt of the barracks lifestyle was administered in figurative beating after figurative beating through the real thing with bars of soap inserted into socks as he was held down with a blanket and pummelled on his abdominal paunch.
The focus of the movie, however stark the beginning with Leonard's ghastly ending was; turns out to be the realism embedded in the dreadful practicalities of war and the all too many young men in their prime struck down by the enemy to die even more horribly than Leonard does in the latrine on graduation night.
I'm always left considering my meager boot camp experience with that of Leonard's and my substellar military service experience viz a viz Joker's. That feeling that I wouldn't have stood a chance in either is the resounding result every time. So Full Metal Jacket always makes me appreciate my frailties — of which there are many. Also, I'm typically inclined to be thankful that I didn't take the road less travelled which would have been Paris Island in the case of the marines.
I suppose the term it calls to mind when I get all defensive whenever I see the movie is that wuss that I must be in actuality.