"Jarhead" by Anthony Swofford

In this self-lacerating memoir, an ex-Marine sniper who fought in the Gulf yearns to escape from the myths of warfare and the sadism of military life.

By Laura Miller

Mar 10, 2003 | The dirty secret about combat memoirs isn't that war is senseless or that heroes are often terrified or that the battlefield can turn even good men into dehumanized monsters or that everyone is bored except for the moments when they're scared shitless or even that there is a beast inside every last one of us. The secret is that these stories are all more or less the same, once you decide which of two categories they belong to: tales of valor and tales of squalor.

The tales of valor have enjoyed a resurgence of late, particularly those about World War II, but despite "Band of Brothers" and other enterprises of the late Stephen Ambrose, the second, bleaker type of war story is still ascendant. Its touchstones are Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" (a novel, but still) and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," books that strive to explain that, stupid as it is to fight wars, it is even stupider to glorify the fighting of them. And, more recently, war memoirs verge on disparaging themselves, so dark and roiling is the contempt to be found in them. Anthony Swofford's "Jarhead" is one of those books; you imagine him half-wishing, as he gets to the end of the book, that he could reach back and start erasing it from the beginning.

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. His war was short, and it only takes up the last third or so of this slender book. Of necessity, Swofford devotes more pages to his childhood and youth, his training in the U.S. and overseas, and the several months he spent stationed with his platoon in the Arabian desert waiting for the war to begin.

Initially, "Jarhead" delivers some jolts. Marine barracks are not known for their decorum, but Swofford describes his mates and himself as brutal, petulant, thoughtless, wretched, sadistic, wrathful and sometimes borderline sociopathic. He remembers being beaten mercilessly by a sergeant, holding a gun to the head of a fellow Marine until the other man wept uncontrollably, fantasizing for hours about the "pink mist" resulting from a properly-aimed shot to an enemy's head, contemplating suicide, auctioning off seminude photos of his unfaithful girlfriend, looting the corpses of Iraqi soldiers for trophies and consuming impressive amounts of cheap booze and porn.

From "Jarhead," you will learn that Marines pump themselves up by watching war movies on video: "We yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it's the most recent war." The fact that these films are meant to be antiwar doesn't faze them. "Actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war," Swofford writes, "no matter what the supposed message." Marines love them because "the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of [our] fighting skills."

You will also learn that both of the Marine recruiters Swofford met with in his 17th year (the first time around he couldn't get permission to enlist from his father, an Air Force veteran who said, "I know some things about the military that they don't show you in the brochures") made access to inexpensive foreign prostitutes a highlight of their pitch. And that despite their hearty enthusiasm for the services of such ladies (not really available in Saudi Arabia, it must be said), the Marines Swofford served with were obsessed with the fidelity of the wives and girlfriends they'd left in the States. They maintained a "Wall of Shame," a post to which they duct-taped photographs of cheatin' women with notes detailing their betrayals: "This bitch fucked my brother," etc.

And then there's the grotesquely sexualized horseplay and hazing, the preoccupation with homosexual acts and the inability to distinguish them from violent domination: the "boot" Marine who was nicknamed "Ellie Bows" and referred to by the feminine pronoun; the football game that degenerates into a "field-fuck" of pantomimed sodomy inflicted on "typically someone who has recently been a jerk or abused rank or acted antisocial"; tricking the new guy into thinking they're going to brand him with a red-hot coat hanger; referring to mouths -- and new recruits -- as "cum receptacles."

Finally, you will see that if the creative impulse flourishes anywhere in the Marine Corps it is in the elaboration of spectacular profanity. One recruit parodies drill instructors by strutting through the barracks, hollering "You cumsuckers don't love my Corps. You shitbags disparage the memory of Chesty Puller every day with your lazy carcasses lying around on these cots like desert princesses jerking your rotten clits!" A sergeant knocks the Fifth Regiment as "all the inbreeds and degenerates. They came from the same mama somewhere in the woods of North Carolina. A big old green, wart-covered jarhead-mama. She shits MREs and pisses diesel fuel." (MREs, meals ready to eat, are the dehydrated food on which soldiers survive in the field.) A drill instructor orders Swofford, chosen to be the camp's Catholic lay reader, to "pray like a motherfucker."

Next Page: "None of the rewards of victory will come my way -- they accrue in Washington and Riyadh and Manhattan, south of 125th Street"

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