Marine writers sound off on the new Iraq war

"Jarhead" author Anthony Swofford and two other Marine Corps chroniclers of Desert Storm direct some not-so-friendly fire at the Bush administration.

By David Talbot

Mar 20, 2003 | The first Gulf War was over in weeks, a spasm of fire and death known more for its awesome display of American technological superiority than for the dog-soldier heroism of World War II or the tragic futility of the Vietnam War. So it's no surprise that Desert Storm did not inspire the stacks of combat literature those two earlier wars did. But now, on the eve of a new war against Saddam Hussein, we have two decidedly unromantic memoirs of the first Gulf War by Marine veterans, Anthony Swofford's "Jarhead" and Joel Turnipseed's "Baghdad Express," as well as "Dear Mr. President," a floridly violent and hallucinatory collection of short stories inspired by the Gulf War and its aftermath, by former Marine rifleman Gabe Hudson. And the message of all three books is the same: The Gulf War might have been brief and -- at least to the American public -- glorious, but the reality on the ground, or sand, was ugly, and it had haunting effects on many of the soldiers who fought it.

As a quarter of a million uniformed Americans again await their marching orders against Saddam's forces, Salon spoke to these three soldiers-turned-authors about their memories of Gulf War I and their feelings about Gulf War II. Swofford, whose sniper platoon was one of the first American military units to cross into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia when the war began, is not as sanguine as some observers about how "surgical" the upcoming war will be. "No doubt we'll prevail -- we have the most powerful military in the history of the world," says Swofford, speaking by phone from a hotel room in Sacramento, Calif., where he is promoting his lavishly praised new book. (Click here to read Laura Miller's review in Salon.) "But if we go into Baghdad and the Iraqi military is willing to fight, it will be messy. Last time they were exposed in the open desert and they were fighting in a country not their own. But, God, I hope we don't spend six weeks trying to take Baghdad. My real fears are what happens after the war. If we do end up bombing Baghdad for several weeks, the survivors might not be that happy with the American occupation; it might not be as easy as some people say. The idea that we step in and everything goes cleanly is ludicrous."

Swofford's account of the smoking aftermath of a U.S bombing raid on Iraqi troops in Kuwait is one of the most unshakably graphic passages in modern war literature:

"Two large bomb depressions on either side of the circle of [Iraqi] vehicles look like the marks a fist would make in a block of clay ... The corpses are badly burned and decaying, and when the wind shifts up the rise, I smell and taste their death, like a moist rotten sponge shoved into my mouth. I vomit into my mouth, I swish the vomit around before expelling it, as though it will cover the stink and taste of the dead men ... The men's boots are cooked to their feet. The man to my right has no head. To my left, the man's head is between his legs, and his arms hang at his sides like the burnt flags of defeated countries. The insects of the dead are swarming. Though I can make out no insignia, I imagine that the man across from me commanded the unit, and that when the bombs landed, he was in the middle of issuing a patrol order, Tomorrow we will kick some American ass.

"It would be silly to speak, but I'd like to. I want to ask the dead their names and identification numbers and tell them this will soon end. They must have questions for me. But the distance between the living and dead is too immense to breach."

Turnipseed, who drove a tractor-trailer loaded with 155mm shells across the desert battlefield as part of the greatest logistical operation in Marine Corps history, has similar concerns about the new war looming in the Gulf. "As a veteran, I'm not a big fan of this one coming up," he says, on the phone from his home in Minneapolis. "Once a Marine, always a Marine, you have to respect your fellow soldiers, even love them. But in a war they can do stupid or evil things. Bullets and bombs go astray and kill people's daughters. You can topple a hated dictator like Saddam and have his people cheering you in the streets, they can be putting flowers in your rifle. But that doesn't stop a stray round from penetrating an apartment building and killing someone's daughter. And that round says, 'Made in the USA' -- and that's what people remember.

"Anyone who's worked on a software project knows how hard it is to get everything right," adds the 34-year-old Turnipseed, who founded and sold a software company called Archemedia before publishing his memoir. "Modeling human processes -- even the simplest of them -- is amazingly difficult. To think you're going to do anything as chaotic as fighting a war and having it follow your plans, it's idiotic."

Turnipseed knows from his own Gulf War experience how badly things can go wrong. A self-described "smartass" punk who, after being kicked out of his college's philosophy program, was whiling away his hours "expanding my Clash and Replacement and Husker Du record collection," Turnipseed suddenly found himself behind the wheel of a commandeered 1960s-era Mercedes truck, "overloaded with bombs and driving off-road through the desert without any training." Three of the 30 men in his unit died in truck accidents during the war. "We had no training. They asked us, 'Do you know how to drive a stick? Then get in that truck and go.'"

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