Book description
Anthony Swofford's
Jarhead
is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is
a searing, unforgettable narrative.
When the marines -- or
"jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to
Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a
hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands.
It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his
girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was
punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun
on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and
Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a
landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in
a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.
Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot
camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor),
reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles
with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he
is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son
of a soldier, and a man.
Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War,
which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts
the conventional wisdom that U. S. military interventions are now
merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few
American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans
who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses
left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have
reentering civilian life.
A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness
struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that
short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's
A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They
Carried, and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose
but also for the depth of its pained heart.
"A brutally honest memoir...gut-wrenching
frontline reportage."
--Entertainment Weekly
Anthony Swofford served in a U. S. Marine Corps
Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the
Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College;
the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa
Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis
and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The
New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and
other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he
lives in New York.
