"Jarhead" by Anthony Swofford

http://www.powells.com/authors/swofford.html

A Gulf War veteran speaks out. "I was over there to fight for oil" October 25, 2002 | Page 6. ANTHONY SWOFFORD is a former Marine corporal who fought in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1808640992&cf=info

Release Date: November 4th, 2005 (wide). When a young man joins the Marines and trains to be a sniper, he finds himself plunged into the chaotic swirl of sand, oil, fire and death that was the Gulf War.

[Maelstrom]

Sons of bitches are casting this movie in seductive terms.

Don't get suckered into this money pit by terrorist propagandists.

Quotes from various websites:
Sam Mendes directs this adaptation of ex-Marine Anthony Swofford's memoirs

Anthony Swofford's account of his life on the front lines is so honest and uncompromising as to be brutal." The buzz was palpable now, and growing louder by the day.

"The individual soldier has not really been considered and is not being given a voice," the author explained upon his return to Powells.com. "My book offers a soldier's voice at a time when one needs to be heard."

Anthony Swofford: Is it possible that my book is pro-war in the same way that I say the Vietnam films, for the fighter, for the potential combatant, are pro-war? I suppose that's a possibility. It could be in the hands of a young marine about to go to war, and he may be reading it and indeed becoming excited by the carnage and fascinated by the mythos. I write about all that, the dime group at a grand…though I undermine it in other ways, much like I think some of the Vietnam flicks do.

Swofford: I had a few great moments after my reading in Seattle. It was the first time I've signed books across the table from someone who was going to go buy it and who'd come to hear me read. There was a mix of women from thirty to sixty-five.

A Gulf War veteran speaks out. "I was over there to fight for oil" October 25, 2002 | Page 6. ANTHONY SWOFFORD is a former Marine corporal who fought in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

Swofford was a lance corporal in a United States Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon who saw combat in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the Gulf War. Specifically, he was fired upon by both the enemy and his own side, but didn't actually kill anyone himself.

http://writ.findlaw.com/books/reviews/20030418_williamson.html
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A Skewed View of Life in the Marines:
A Review of Anthony Swofford's Jarhead
By SAM WILLIAMSON
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Friday, Apr. 18, 2003

Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner 2003)

The reviews for Anthony Swofford's book Jarhead, a memoir about his service in the Marine Corps in the first Gulf War, have been almost universally positive; in fact, I haven't read a single negative one. As a result, I was looking forward to reading it. But the book, contrary to expectations, left me largely disappointed.

Perhaps in order to deal with his own emotional baggage, Swofford plays to his readers' negative stereotypes about Marines, barely mentioning the many exemplary aspects of Marines and the Marine Corps. He's plainly done so in order to create a more outrageous book. But the end result is not entirely accurate - and is far from balanced or fair.

A Highly Negative Portrait of STA Platoon

The title itself gives away where Swofford is going. "Jarhead" is the other services' pejorative term for Marines. It refers both to the short "high and tight" haircut that many Marines wear, and to the fact that many other services think of Marines as exceptionally hard-headed or obstinate.

While many Marines use this term with affection, no Marine appreciates being called a jarhead by a soldier, sailor or air-person. Although Swofford unquestionably has the right to use the term, it signals that he will concentrate on a certain side of the Marine Corps, and it's not a positive one.

Of course, I come to Jarhead with my own baggage. Like Swofford, I served in the Marine Corps infantry for about four years - and thus my experience contained many of the same threads. Unlike Swofford, however, I was an officer, and except for a brief, approximately month-long period during which my battalion thought we were going to Somalia to provide security for the United Nations' withdrawal, I never saw, or even got very close to, a combat situation.

Swofford was a member of the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon. The STA platoon that is largely made up of snipers and, within an infantry battalion, generally contains some of the better Marines in the battalion: there is usually some sort of physical and mental test before a Marine from one of the other companies in the battalion is admitted to the STA Platoon.

I was fortunate enough to be the commanding officer of the company that contains STA Platoon, and I spent a lot of time training with those Marines. A number of them were certainly among the best Marines I met during my time in the Marine Corps, but they also had a justified reputation for being prima donnas.

A Portrayal that May Be Correct, But Fails to Be Balanced

In Jarhead, Swofford discusses his experience in the Gulf War in the fall of 1990 and early 1991. As he does, he intersperses stories about his childhood, and his time in the Marine Corps - particularly those events that played a role in landing him in the desert waiting for battle.

Swofford spends a great deal of time describing the relationship between the Marines in STA Platoon, and the various ways that they spend time while waiting for the war to start. The picture Swofford paints of the Marines is far from a positive one: Swofford tells stories of "field-****s," where the rest of the platoon simulates gang raping one of its members, and physical abuse in boot camp. In general, he portrays the training Marines receive as aimed at producing mindless killers.

It's impossible to pinpoint any one aspect of Swofford's portrayal of life in the Marine Corps and say that it's incorrect. Yet, as a former Marine, I simply didn't feel like Swofford's portrayal of life in the Marine Corps rang true.

The Marine Corps is not a perfect organization - far from it. But by so relentlessly showing one side of the Marine Corps, the side consistent with the public's worst fears about what organizations like the Marines do to young men, Swofford paints a false portrait through his omissions.

Exaggerations Throw the Account Into Doubt

Some of this is due to some obvious exaggerations that Swofford worked into his stories, all of which seemed unnecessary. For example, at one point Swofford says that he's "been in the Marine Corps less than two years, and I've probably performed this one act, assembling the M16, more than ten thousand times." But that can't be true; it would mean that he assembled his M16 over 15 times every single day of those two years. Even averaging breaking down a weapon one time a day would seem high; though there would doubtless be days where a Marine broke down his weapon multiple times, there would also be many days where the weapons sat in the armory unused.

Similarly, at another point Swofford says that he's "been on thousands of patrols," but that too seems unlikely, since it would mean that he'd been on more than one per day during his relatively short stint as a Marine. While patrolling is an important part of training, and would certainly have been a focus for STA platoon, it's only one of many skills a Marine needs to muster, and there's no way that Swofford went on "thousands of patrols."

These are small exaggerations, but they lead the reader to wonder why Swofford needed to employ them, when he could have been entirely accurate without any more effort. Because the rest of the story seemed so overblown, I couldn't help wondering if Swofford wasn't overstating the way the Marines interacted in just the same way that he overstates how many patrols he went on, or how many times he broke down and reassembled his M16.

Questionable Portraits of the Marines with Women, and Among Themselves

For example, Swofford's discussions of women and Marines (infantry Marines are all male) would lead the reader to conclude that every Marine was sleeping with prostitutes at every opportunity, and that the battalion had no sooner left for the Gulf than every wife was in bed with the local filling station attendant.

Now, there's no question that when you take a group of twenty-something year old boys/men, there are going to be some legendary failures in their relationships with women. Every officer and NCO spends far too much of his time providing marital counseling to troubled twenty-year olds. These problems even led a former Commandant to propose that the Marine Corps cease accepting married recruits.

But that said, I also saw young marriages that were incredibly strong, and left me in awe of the commitment that existed between people so young. These relationships rate less than a paragraph in Jarhead. Yet, in contrast, there are pages and pages describing the failures that existed between women and the Marines of STA platoon.

Swofford's tales of how the Marines interact among themselves is similarly unbalanced - a partial truth. Take a large number of young, aggressive and incredibly energetic young men; add in rigorous training and advanced firepower; and you'll have a recipe for hijinks that will leave even the most aggressive football locker room in the shade. Some of those episodes are hilarious, and some are a little disturbing. Swofford does a good job describing those.

But there are also moments where those testosterone-laden boys learn to act like men - both with each other, and also with women. And that's what makes the Marine Corps an amazing organization. It takes young people and shows them how to fight and lead, even if their backgrounds give no indication that they have any capacity for either.

Swofford expends no meaningful energy at all describing this side of the Marine Corps, or the legendary discipline and commitment that have made the Marines so successful.

The funny thing is that in spite of the constantly negative spin that Swofford gives life in the Marine Corps, he clearly wants to show that he was as good a Marine as any: able to run fast, bench press heavy weights, and put three shots from 1000 yards in a group so tight that it could be covered by a dime. Swofford's need to denigrate the Marine Corps while referring to his own abilities reminded me of a girl I knew in high school who constantly made fun of debutante societies and social registers while reminding everyone that her family was prominently placed in both.

Over-Selling Largely Pedestrian Experiences

The other problem with Jarhead is that Swofford's story is not that interesting, and because this is a memoir, it ultimately succeeds or fails on the strength of the author's experience.

Essentially, Swofford sat in the desert for a long time, and then had a few furious hours of combat, though it appears that his battalion was not in the heavier areas of the fighting; except for one patrol, STA Platoon was essentially relegated to observer status. I have no doubt that those many months waiting for the war were unbelievably trying, and that the actual battle was every bit as terrifying as Swofford describes it. That said, Swofford's prose can be so breathless that it seems completely out of proportion to the events being described.

For example, after eating a pear in the desert, Swofford writes, "I throw the pear, and when it lands, sand attaches to the moist fruit, like memory to the soft parts of the brain." In another instance, he writes, "I throw my rifle to the deck, and the sound of the hard plastic hand guards and the rifle metal bouncing against the concrete is not unlike the mad clatter of a New Orleans funeral march returning to the city from the grave." These are images so overblown, they actually minimize the events they are meant to magnify.

There are times when Swofford perfectly captures a young man's approach to life, as when he describes his interactions with a Marine recruiter: "The recruiter guaranteed me I could book a threesome for forty American dollars in Olongapo, PI. I'd just turned seventeen. I'd had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs. I was sold."

But those moments are sparsely placed among seemingly endless introspection and stories of over-the-top behavior among the Marines of STA Platoon. By the end of the memoir, it seems as if these stories have been told to fulfill Swofford's readers' most salacious fantasies about how Marines behave among themselves.

Swofford Fails to Depict Marines' Skill, Discipline, and Professionalism

At the end of the book, Swofford describes a scene after the war, in which a Vietnam vet tells the Marines, "Thank you, thank you jarheads, for making them see we are not bad animals." That vet was right; in both gulf wars, the U.S. military has performed with incredible skill and discipline, and America has learned that the My Lais of Vietnam were the exception, not the rule.

Unfortunately, Swofford concentrates on the animalistic side of the military, barely mentioning the traits that made the military's performance in both Gulf Wars so impressive. As a result, his account in Jarhead can only help revive the false public perception that Marines need to be kept behind glass that is broken only in time of war.

Sam Williamson is an attorney practicing in New York. He frequently reviews legal thrillers for this site. Prior to attending law school, Williamson spent nearly four years as a Marine infantry officer, eventually reaching the rank of Captain and serving as a company commander.
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