‘Marines’ doc focuses on purpose amid shifting Pacific landscape

Netflix on Tuesday released its four-episode documentary series on the U.S. Marine Corps.

Coinciding with the service’s 250th birthday, “Marines” follows the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit — one of just seven Marine expeditionary units and the only permanently forward-deployed Marine expeditionary unit — “as they conduct high-stakes combat exercises in the Pacific,” according to the streaming service’s synopsis.

“When I first joined on, I found I was nervous,” director Chelsea Yarnell told Military Times in a recent interview. “I was thinking, ‘I don’t know too much about the Marines. Am I the right person to tell this story?’

“I found, almost immediately upon filming, that [being an outsider] was almost like my superpower because the Marine Corps is very dense. It’s a very insular world. My collaborators and I very much wanted the series to be for the layman, not necessarily just people who have served.”

While the documentary puts the viewer through its paces regarding a tome of acronyms, Yarnell is correct in her assessment that the series will be accessible to the general viewership.

At the heart of the documentary is the notion of purpose: How do these men and women find purpose if not in war?

It was a question that many Marines featured in the series grappled with.

When asked about the copious number of times Marines used the word “kill” throughout the series, Sebastian Junger, who serves as an executive producer of the documentary, told Military Times that “to a civilian sensibility, all that talk is can be a little unsavory, a little unpleasant, but so is the idea of a bayonet at the end of a rifle. It’s just what war is about.”

“There’s also a sort of culture of bravado and boasting and sort of performed toughness that I think is psychologically necessary in combat,” he continued. “There is also the deep insecurity of … young people who have been trained to kill, who have never been near a battlefield and are extremely self-conscious of that, and are talking about themselves with a lot of bravado and inflated terms in order to impress on us, and, more importantly, on themselves, that they’re up to the job.”

To join the military is to almost fulfill a biological need, according to Junger.

“War immediately puts us into our evolutionary past,” he said. “We existed for thousands of years in adverse circumstances. Modern society doesn’t really provide circumstances like that anymore for us to do our sort of evolutionary thing — the thing we’re genetically programmed for. The military does that, whether it’s on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier or on patrol in Kandahar Province.”

For some in the series, the Marine Corps provides that purpose in the form of stability for themselves and for their families. For others, it was following a long familial tradition of serving.

“I think what struck me about the people who were questioning that purpose had joined the Marines, hoping that their military service would be a cure-all, but it really wasn’t,” said Yarnell. “Or it was maybe just diving deeper into the question in a way that they weren’t anticipating.”

While filming the documentary, the 31st MEU grappled with unprecedented changes both internally and externally as the landscape of modern warfare has shifted.

In 2023, scout sniper platoons, whose history dates back to World War I, was scrapped for scout platoons specifically focused on reconnaissance.

Separating the sniper role from infantry battalions is one aspect of the Corps’ Force Design 2030 plan, Military Times previously reported, which seeks to “divest the preponderance of weapon-specific military occupational specialties in the infantry battalions and build highly trained Marines who are capable of employing a range of weapons and equipment,” according to Marine spokesman Capt. Ryan Bruce.

The Netflix filmmakers were on-hand to see such transition made in real-time.

“It was deeply emotional for them in a way that was shocking for me,” according to Yarnell. “I didn’t expect for it to be something that was so soul crushing. It’s not just a job to them. It’s their identity.”

Such sweeping changes were made, the documentary alludes, to keep up with emerging adversaries in the Pacific — namely China.

Filmed primarily over the course of three months in 2024, the filmmakers embedded with the nation’s “911 force,” with the support of Gen. Eric M. Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps.

According to a Marine press release, Smith directed Marine leaders to provide “complete, unfettered, unvarnished access” to grunt machine gunners, fighter pilots and unit leaders aboard USS America and USS Green Bay.

The four, 45-minute episodes delve into a side of operations rarely seen by those outside the service — from the claustrophobic heat and smell that permeates the bowels of a ship — with sailors naturing blaming the Marines for the stench — to crucial maritime interdiction missions.

“We were constantly aware and surprised by the level of access we were given, filming in spaces that had never been documented before,” Yarnell told Military Times. “I think for me, I really felt pressure to make sure that the series reflected the reality of an overseas deployment, just because no one had been given this opportunity in the past.

“We saw it as our our job as storytellers, to tell our stories within the spaces we were granted access to because they were so generous.”