"Some people demand a five-line capsule summary.  Something you'd read in a magazine.  They want you to say, 'This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.'  I hear people try to do it -- give the five-line summary -- but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it's usually wrong, and it's necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary.  If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant."

"I've always considered everyone in the movie business to be a little insane, and the whole thing (to be) sort of a chase for fairy gold . . . I trust Stanley, but I always kept both of my eyes open.  I didn't want to make another film that veterans are just going to go see and go, 'Oh, wow, we've been ripped off again.'"  The Private Joker played by Matthew Modine is only loosely autobiographical.  Like Joker, Hasford did wear a peace symbol on his flak jacket, but "the guy in the film is a much nicer guy than I am," he says, laughing.

"Vietnam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up.  (The Green Berets doesn't count.  That wasn't really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.)  So we have all been compelled to make our own movies, as many movies as there are correspondents, and this one is mine."

January 4, 1983: "Stanley and I, after about a dozen long talks, are lobbing frags.  I told Stanley he didn't know shit from Shinola about Vietnam.  And he's so sensitive, he got mad...Boy, famous people think they know everything."

February 1, 1984: "Stanley gets miffed every time I mention (Killer's Kiss), so I mention it all the time.  Or I say I liked Spartacus, another one he doesn't care for.  I'm going to go live at Stanley's house and we'll write the screenplay.  Then I'm going to be technical adviser during the production...The other day he threatened to hire Michael Herr to help him write the film.  I told him, be my guest.  Stanley can't replace me...Michael Herr can rite gud, but he wasn't a Marine, he was just a very perceptive tourist."

January 18, 1985:  "Stanley and I are getting along great.  Michael Herr and I are big pals.  I had dinner over at his place last night...Look for the movie around 1999--Stanley...insists on doing every single thing himself.  Today Michael and I were joking with him, saying that when the film came out Stanley would probably insist on taking the tickets...Stanley didn't think it was funny.  He just looked at us with that Buddha face of his, as though considering doing just that."

May 27, 1985:  "Stanley feels that all my efforts for the past 2 1/2 years are
 1. Minimal
 2. Only Natural - and expected - of me as the author of a book being made iinto a film.
This explains why he never says “Thank you”.  But this is bullshit - I’m being ripped off.  Stanley has held up the screenplay credit as a carrot (and jokes about how he “may” use my title).  I wrote endings for the film 2 weeks after he started talking to me.  I’ve been here 5 months and I’ve seen him once.  He said 'Come over and we’ll "work together."'  What’s his hang up?  He doesn’t want to share the credit.  He’ll give Michael credit. 2nd credit.  But if he gives me a credit and I wrote the book as well then I will seem to rival him as the 'author' of the film.  Burgess didn’t work on 'clockwork orange'?  SHINING = no King?  He wants my ideas, yes, but he doesn’t want to give me credit for them - neither publicly nor in his own mind - witness his pathetically unfounded attempt to discuss my 2 1/2 years of effort as 'a couple of phone calls.'
    "Remember that Stanley had trouble with Stephen King - he doesn’t want me to be his enemy in the media.  It would hurt the movie.  Michael says that he thinks the film is going to be a classic.
If so, then it will be in large part due to my book and my screenwriting..ie; a multi-million dollar success for which I have been paid peanuts.  Typical of Stanley’s manipulations is his saying he’ll give me $7000 because 'he likes me.'"

Letter to Kubrick, 1985:  "You say I'm not cooperative.  I see no advantage in being cooperative.  I've seen how you respond to people who are kind and helpful and on your side.  So I'm not interested in being reasonable.  I'm not interested in ethics and fair play.  All I'm interested in is how to attack you where you are most vulnerable and where I can inflict the most damage if you don't give me what I want...that attitude is, as we say in Alabama, "Something I learned off of you."  Don't blame me if I have been an attentive student.  I'm cooperative when I'm dealing with cooperative people.
    "As for Full Metal Jacket, I deny paternity.  I don't claim authorship of anything unless I am able to do my best, and I was not allowed to do my best...
    "I'm in no hurry.  There's no point in my consulting a lawyer until you've released the film, because it's not plagarism until you release the film and accept money from people who want to see it....if you want to settle this once and for all, keep in mind that I'm tired to people who think that it's clever not to pay their debts on time.  If your check is late I will send I will send it back, as I have done before, more than once.
    "After this contract mess is settled, I'll expect the same level of cordial cooperation from you people I have enjoyed in the past, that is, no cooperation at all."

July 14, 1985:  "Here in London the Great Movie Wars...are going hot and heavy.  The situation is very complex, but the basic issue is one of screen credit.  I've pretty much written Stanley's movie (Michael and I are big pals now, but--off the record--Michael's biggest contribution...has been his famous name) and Stanley has added a few minor things, but essentially the screenplay is by me.  But Stanley wants to give me an 'additional dialogue' credit...He threatens to pull the plug on the whole thing.  Meanwhile, I am refusing to sign my screenwriter's contract.  Shooting was scheduled to start on July 1st, so I have held up the production for two weeks...I'm starting to feel all alone, like Gary Cooper in High Noon."

September 1985:  "The situation now is that I have delayed signing...until Stanley was forced to start filming, which he did on Aug. 25.  The white flag has not yet waved...but I have beaten that self-described Napoleon son-of-a-bitch and I have beat him fair and square."

March 1, 1986:  "Late flash:  FILMING IS FINISHED!...I cannot believe this situation.  I finally pried a copy of the shooting script out of Stanley's famously anal-retentive fingers.  It's 99% mine."

May 20, 1986:  "I won my credit battle with Stanley.  I beat Stanley, City Hall, The Powers That Be, and all of the lawyers at Warner Brothers, up to and including the Supreme Boss Lawyer.  As a little Canuck friend of mine would say:  I kicked dey butt."
 

    "We'd all heard about the man in the Highlands who was 'building his own gook,' parts were the least of his troubles.  In Chu Lai some Marines pointed out a man to me and swore to God they'd seen him bayonet a wounded NVA and then lick the bayonet clean.  There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, 'How can you shoot women and children?' and he'd answered, 'It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much.'"

    "And if you saw some piece of helmet graffiti that seemed to say everything, you weren't going to pass it along to some colonel or tell it to a Psyops official.  'Born to Kill' placed in all innocence next to the peace symbol, or 'A sucking chest wound is Nature's way of telling you that you've been in a firefight' was just too good to share with anyone but a real collector..."

    "Having read Dispatches, it is difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism, heroism and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear, war and death."

from Rolling Stone, 1987:  "It's a very short, very beautifully and economically written book, which, like the film, leaves out all the mandatory scenes of character development: the scene where the guy talks about his father, who's an alcoholic, his girlfriend -- all that stuff that bogs down and seems so arbitrarily inserted into every war story."

from The Washington Post, June 28, 1987:  "This book," Kubrick says, "was written in a very, very, almost poetically spare way. There was tremendous economy of statement, and Hasford left out all the 'mandatory' war scenes that are put in to make sure you understand the characters and make you wish he would get on with the story ... I tried to retain this approach in the film. I think as a result, the film moves along at an alarming – hopefully an alarming – pace."
 
 

from HBO Online Chat, August 2000:  "I was also technical advisor of the show.  I advised Stanley that the first half - the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket - was laced with fictitious crap, and he and I sat down and re-wrote the first half of the show.  The way we did it was we would discuss a scene, then Stanley would then punch the button on his tape recorder.  I would then stand up and become Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and I would go for as long as I could go.  When I ran out of gas, I would stop and sit down.  We would discuss the scene again.  Once again the button would be pushed, I would stand up, and we would do more dialogue.  We would do this sometimes 3 or 4 times.  Then we would send the tape down to the production secretary, who would transcribe that and then send it back up to us.  We would then take the juiciest of the line and incorporate those into the scene. That's how we came up with the dialogue.  In some cases, I would come up with dialogue when we were filming.  If something would occur to me during filming of anything, I would bring it up to Stanley.  Stanley would either agree or disagree.  He seldom disagreed, and we would incorporate that into the scene.  That's the way the 'reach around' scene came about."
 

from TVNow, 2001:  "The best part about the movie, and everybody seems to rave about it, is the boot camp part.  I got to write most of everything I said.  It was based on a novel called The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford, who only went through boot camp. That's his only experience with the Marines. According to Gustav, the only reason drill instructors existed was to harass, punish and torture recruits. There was no rhyme nor reason.
    "He actually wrote a scene where Gunnery Sergeant Hartman called the recruit squad leaders into the head, had them urinate in a commode, and then brought Private Pyle in there and shoved his head down in it. I never heard of that being done. The recruits would have never had respect for a drill instructor that would do something like that."
 

    "Although the Academy Award nominated screenplay was essentially the work of Kubrick and Herr, Kubrick agreed to give Hasford a co-screenplay credit..."  (No way to know for sure just how much of the screenplay was the work of Gus, but one look at it and it's obvious that the structure and much of the dialogue are straight out of The Short-Timers.  And Kubrick "agreed to give Hasford a co-screenplay credit" only after a lengthy battle where Gus threatened to do everything he could to shut down production.)

    "Hasford, who completed an unpublished sequel to The Short-Timers entitled The Phantom Blooper, died of diabetes a few years later, after bing sentenced to prison for stealing thousands of library books."  (Bullshit!  Unless I'm hallucinating, The Phantom Blooper was published by Bantam in 1990.  And Gus spent a few months in jail for stealing 800 library books, not "thousands.")
 
 

    "Anyway," the Beaver continues, "he had it coming.  We've got an important job to do in Southeast Asia, an American job.  Sacrifices have to be made.  We've got to keep our head until this peace craze blows over.  It's a hardball world and Communist aggression must be defeated at any price.  What's wrong with spraying a few people with napalm if it makes the world a better place to live in?  We are killing these people for their own good.  Inside every gook is an American trying to get out."