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March 21, 2004
Review: Truth from a reluctant soldier
TO be on a bestseller list is not necessarily a certificate of quality. Yet in a society where the personal memoir is a popular genre Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead has attracted lyrical reviews, mostly by males. They are splashed over the front and back covers and three inside pages of the paperback edition published in 2003.
The book whose title is the sobriquet used for enlisted men because their regulation cropped hair gives the appearance of a jar, is some 260 pages of narrative giving a young man’s experience of the military life, the preparation for war and the short war itself lasting about six weeks in the Kuwaiti desert. Almost every page is littered with obscenities and profanities which make a mere female reviewer blench, but given the fact that smut is a commodity in the United States, this factor surely contributed to sales. The author, whose candour is commendable, acknowledges his editor who laboured with him page by page, no doubt with his eye to the market.
Only twenty years of age when he finds himself thrust into the Saudi desert, Anthony Swofford discovers that joining the Marines was a wrong decision. He is not deceived by the officer’s hearty announcement that they are to part of Operation Desert Shield. “We’ll be shielding enough oil to drive millions of cars for hundreds of millions of miles, at a relatively minor cost to the American consumer,” he comments. “...we also know that the outcome of the conflict is less important for us — the men who will fight and die — than for the old {expletive} and others who have billions of dollars to gain or lose in the oilfields, the deep, rich, flowing oilfields of the Kingdom of Saud.”
He has dedicated his book to his mates of the US Marines of Service and Target Acquisition Platoon, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, with whom he served in the first Gulf War from August 1990 to April 1991. The period covered by the book describes his recruitment, training, battle experience and his exit from the army. In his words, “The months of training and deployment, the loneliness, the boredom, the fatigue...”
“To be a marine, a true marine, you must kill. With all of your training, all of your expertise, if you don’t kill you’re not a combatant... You will receive a Combat Action Ribbon, and if unlucky enough to have been hit but not fatally, a Purple Heart, or if you’re hit fatally your mother will receive your Purple Heart.”
Barrack life is a weary, brutalizing process. The men thrown together exchange foul-mouthed descriptions of their real or imagined loveless, promiscuous encounters. One fears they could succumb to sexually transmitted diseases long before they face bullets. For youth to be rendered so jaded and cynical is an indictment of the war machine.
Swofford graphically punctures the myth that war is about heroism. The confused mercenaries who enlist hardly know why they signed “the contract”.
The actual engagement with Iraqi troops comes well after the half way point of the book. Writing from memory and other records some ten years later, the author recalls his experience of the desert sands in which the soldiers dug shelters, drove vehicles and searched for targets. When finding dead Iraqi soldier’s lance corporal Swofford wonders why those corpses should have been his enemies.
The sergeant is a standard authority figure, Swofford’s platoon is not without its heartless disciplinarian who sees through their ruses. The barrack room language is unsparing. It is a revelation that comfort and good rations are not a concern of army bosses. The soldier carries up to one hundred pounds of equipment while trudging on duty. The billets at various bases are dreary, the only recreation is found in neighbouring bars with attendant alcoholism and prostitution.
With uncompromising candour the anti-hero recounts his own unsavoury adventures. He also depicts fear and its uncontrollable effects on body and mind, as also sorrow at the loss of a comrade in battle. Swofford asserts that the book grew out of a need to tell his own truth, a need to unburden himself from grief.
The most admirable aspect of Jarhead is certainly its honest delineation of the external world of the army and the exposure of his own ravaged psyche. This is not to be dismissive of what is obviously a deeply felt personal account, told in a compelling, compulsive manner. However one is saddened for reasons other than the ones that engender such deep-seated melancholia in the young author of this chronicle. If the end product of just one arm of the massive US military juggernaut, the supposedly elite Marine Corps, is the sorry, disenchanted drifter, having great facility with abusive vocabulary and his seemingly need of some form of rehabilitation, then a strong case is made for universal disarmament, beginning with the sole superpower. The greatest obscenity is the squandering of young manhood in futile wars.
One can only lament with Wilfred Owen, the soldier poet of the first world war:
“Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?”
A note at the end of the book tells us that Anthony Swofford has subsequently attended college, taken writers’ courses, has also taught and is working on a novel.
Jarhead — A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War
By Anthony Swofford
Scribner. Available with Mr Books, 10-D Super Market, Islamabad
Tel: 051-2278843-5
Email: mrbooks@isb.comsats.net.pk Website:
www.mrbooks.com.pk
ISBN 0-7432-4861-9
260pp. Rs495
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