There’s another cost to warfare, one incurred before a single bullet plants itself in an enemy’s chest, accompanied by consequences far less tangible but no less tragic than a corpse. Unfortunately, the process of warrior-making requires a degree of dehumanization. Sam Mendes’s Jarhead (2005) details the high price sustained by the soldier who, after being trained to kill without compunction, is denied the opportunity to even fire his weapon at the enemy.

This Gulf War film begins back in America with a reminder that military recruits must, to a certain degree, abandon their personalities and aspirations when they enter the service. If they perform well enough (and live long enough) to move up through the ranks, they may one day reclaim their personhood, but until then they must learn to obey orders without pause or reflection. Doing otherwise can result in death for themselves or those nearby (as becomes fatally clear in one of the training scenes early in the movie). Those who initially balk at bloodshed are forced to become inured to it—even develop a thirst for it. (Mendes’s characters slowly move in this direction with helpful, repeat viewings of the more gratuitous scenes in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, released in 1979).

And yet, though trained to be an unthinking automaton in many respects, each soldier retains enough self-awareness to hurt deeply as prolonged deployment abroad begins to take its inevitable—relational and psychological—toll. Virtually every male character in the movie watches their intimate tie to a wife or girlfriend back home slowly break in two under the pressures of distance and jealousy, driving the victims to despair, rage, and some pretty painful moments of angry self-stimulation. Human desires and promises aren’t always made of the most durable stuff, unfortunately.

In the film’s dramatic but surprisingly non-bloody climax, Mendes shows us a second personal tragedy born of wartime, one produced by inaction and, worse, inutility. Just what do you think happens when someone encouraged day in and day out to accomplish one particular kind of task is prevented from achieving that task, when a person reduced to a tool never receives the opportunity to prove his functionality?

It’s not pretty.

But then, war never is, regardless of how many or how few shots are fired. The cost is measured best, not in horseshoes or hand grenades, blood and guts, but in fractured relationships and splintered souls. War always proves far dearer than the price tag we attempt to place on it.