Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Short-Timers | 1979 | Buy |
| The Phantom Blooper | 1990 | Buy |
| A Gypsy Good Time | 1992 | Buy |
Gustav Hasford served as a combat correspondent with the Marines in Vietnam, and that experience produced The Short-Timers, one of the rawest and most unsettling novels to come out of the war. Published in 1979, the book follows Private Joker from the brutality of boot camp at Parris Island through combat in Vietnam, including the Battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive. Hasford’s prose is stripped down and dark, using gallows humor and flat reportorial detail to convey the psychological damage of the war.
The novel gained a much larger audience when Stanley Kubrick adapted it into Full Metal Jacket in 1987. Hasford co-wrote the screenplay but clashed with Kubrick over credit and creative control. Despite the friction, the resulting film is widely considered one of the best war movies ever made. Hasford published two more books before his death in 1993: The Phantom Blooper, a sequel to The Short-Timers that follows Joker into captivity, and A Gypsy Good Time, a non-war novel set in the American South.