via Netflix
The American soldier we knew for 20 years has evolved. With the new Netflix docuseries MARINES, director Chelsea Yarnell and executive producer Sebastian Junger are here to introduce what comes next.
For two decades, we knew what an American soldier looked like. He was a grunt in the desert, caked in dust, fighting a “lightly armed insurgency that didn’t have artillery, didn’t have an Air Force,” as journalist Sebastian Junger puts it. Junger defined this era with Restrepo, his 2010 documentary from Afghanistan.
Now, Junger is back as an executive producer on MARINES, a new Netflix docuseries, and his message is stark: that soldier, and that kind of warfare, is obsolete. The show features unprecedented access to the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, the US military’s “force in readiness” in the Pacific.
“We’re pivoting right now from the sandbox, as it were in the Middle East, to… a confrontation with China or Russia,” Junger states flatly in an interview. “That’s a new era.”
This is a new kind of war. The “so-called War on Terror” is over. The new threat, as Junger sees it, is “a force that is so powerful… that we may lose.”
via Netflix
“I think they’ll wake up to the idea that we could be in an apocalyptic confrontation with China,” he says. “We had the confidence during the War on Terror that a unit wouldn’t just get overrun and wiped out… We’re now looking at a war where you could lose an entire destroyer… 5000 sailors… that’s the new reality.”
He also points to the “terrifying effectiveness of drone warfare” in Ukraine as a new, game-changing factor. “I don’t know how the military would react if we were taking 90% of our casualties from a… threat that we practically couldn’t counter,” Junger muses. “Unsustainable… I hope they’re trying to figure it out.”
So who is the “fresh-faced kid”—his words—signing up for that?
According to Junger, they’re driven by the same timeless, hardcore ethos that his Restrepo subjects revered from afar. “To get a bunch of 1/73 badasses,” he recalls, “to say that you’re tough, you got to be pretty damn tough, right? And that was the Marine.”
That ethos, he says, remains. It’s “an extremely aggressive, confident ethos that relishes the chance to prove yourself in combat, and wouldn’t blink at the… running a mortal risk to drag a brother or a sister out of the line of fire.”
Enter Chelsea Yarnell. The producers (Amblin and Lucky 8) hired Yarnell—director of 2024’s AMERICA’S SWEETHEARTS: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and the hit Netflix series Cheer—to find the human story beneath the modern Marines ethos. Her “in” was simple: total, unadulterated ignorance.
“Okay, Brandon, I had none,” Yarnell laughs when asked about her preconceived notions. “I don’t know anything about the Marine Corps.”
via Netflix
She quickly realized her naivete was a “superpower.” Unburdened by 250 years of military history, she could bypass the “propaganda machine” and just see the people. “It also is very similar to Cheer in the way that… the main priority really were these, the character portraits,” she explains.
Her search, however, was for the cracks in that “badass” armor aboard the USS Green Bay. “These Marines, they are so proficient, they are unflappable,” Yarnell says. “As someone who’s in there looking for moments of vulnerability, those are hard to come by… Anytime we found a moment of vulnerability, we all celebrated.”
What she found instead of weakness was a group of complex kids on a “search for purpose.” “They really… were happy to be a part of something larger than themselves,” she says. “That was something that connected all of them.”
To find that story, she had to live it. She wasn’t just observing the “complexities of life at sea”; she was a participant in the “extremely close quarters” and the plumbing that “didn’t always work.”
“I felt bonded with them in a way that maybe I had never felt before,” Yarnell admits. “You know, we had to, I had to, like, knock on their doors trying to find toilet paper, because, you know, the ship had run out.”
via Netflix
This is the central, bizarre truth of MARINES. It’s a “coming of age” story—as the marketing copy says—set on the brink of a potential apocalypse. It’s a story about kids who, in their “search for purpose,” are being trained to fight a war Junger desperately “hopes they never see.”
And in the end, the one thing that truly binds these new-world soldiers together is the same thing that held the grunts of Restrepo together: a dark, relentless sense of humor.
“The jokes were just incredible,” Yarnell says, laughing. She notes the Marines loved to rib the documentary’s main subjects. “The call signs, I’m sure of the pilots we followed, of course, this time next year will be Netflix.”
One can only imagine. When you’re 19, living on a ship, and being told you’re the only thing standing between civilization and an “apocalyptic confrontation,” what else are you supposed to do?