I got a call from Sam Mendes, the director who had talked to Anthony Minghella, and Sam was preparing a film called Jarhead, based on the novel by Anthony Swofford, about the First Gulf War in 1990. And did I want to edit it? And as usual, we exchanged... We had lunch and we exchanged ideas, and I got the screenplay. And then I had another meeting, and I thought the screenplay was very good, and I had some ideas about it and he liked those ideas, and so we moved ahead. And I was, again, using Final Cut Pro for the second time on Jarhead, after having used it on Cold Mountain. And it's... Again, it's a wonderful film, it's a war film about a conflict that was very carefully circumscribed in time and space, because some people thought that it was the beginning of a conflict that would lead to an invasion of Iraq. But it didn't, it involved pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait and then slamming the door. Obviously, much more complicated than that. But it was based on the experience of Anthony Swofford, who was involved in this war, and it was peculiar because of the intense feeling for the... He was a member of the US Marines, and the intense feeling of that Marine environment, and the fact that it was a war without significant ground combat. Most of the war was conducted by airplanes and bombs. And so there was a level of frustration on the part of the soldiers, because we've been trained to have combat, he [Swofford] was trained as a sniper. And yet, 'Where's the opportunity to do what I have been trained to do?'

And so in a sense, it was kind of similar in a few ways to K-19. You were dealing with a military environment of people in a closed environment, you were following this one platoon of, you know, people who we came to know very well, and the interactions of these people in a stressful environment. And again, like K-19, without an overt big battle. K-19 does not have a big battle, the battle is an interior battle to survive in this impossible situation. And Jarhead is similar, the frustration is that there was... The battle was taken away from us, we wanted to fight and there was no opportunity to fight. We just had to see the aftereffects of a war, an aerial war that killed many Iraqi soldiers, but we didn't get involved in that. And again, events overcame this film because it was about a war in the Gulf in 1990, and now when we were making the film in 2005, the war in the Middle East in Iraq, was very hot and very contentious. And yet, superficially, if you just looked at the film, it didn't look that different. You know, military costumes and war equipment. The film was accurate, but somebody who was not really informed about the... 'No, in those days we only had 12 screws on the rifle rather than 16, you know?' It appeared as if it were a film about the war that was happening right now, and yet it wasn't.