"Jarhead" by Anthony Swofford

Rough stuff, but not exactly unexpected in a group of young men who are first holed up together in close quarters and then thrust into extreme and immediate danger. Although Swofford is a fine writer, there's nothing especially revelatory in his account of the misery of a grunt's life: vomiting as he burns the contents of the "shitter," a punishment detail; the perpetually broken or missing equipment that doesn't do what it's supposed to do even when intact; the long, hot marches that render his crotch "sweaty and rancid and bleeding."

While it's true that we're preparing to send more Marines like Swofford back into the same country to fight the same foe that he writes about here, what they'll experience psychologically won't differ significantly from what fighting men everywhere have always endured. Whether you're freaking out because the wide-open desert makes you feel exposed or because the jungle can hide hundreds of lethal enemy soldiers, the freak-out itself is pretty much the same. When Swofford dwells on the treachery of the environment in "Saudi," what he says about sand could just as easily be said about jungle: "this most unstable material or medium that will make futile all effort or endeavor."

It's not its timeliness that makes "Jarhead" an object of fascination, but its exoticism. Americans haven't fought a major war in generations. For our average male citizen, military service -- a universal experience for most men throughout human history -- is an alien notion. Yet we haven't shaken our age-old sense that war is a crucible of masculinity, and now those who strenuously resisted the draft when they were eligible can afford to be swayed by the romance of war. Swofford had the misfortune of succumbing to that romance, and to his own "intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood," when he was still young enough to sign up.

He began regretting that decision almost as soon as he'd acted on it, and "Jarhead" thrums with a ceaseless litany of curses and self-flagellation. The lot of the jarhead, Swofford explains again and again, is wretched, and the jarheads themselves base. They travel miles to escape their own kind. Their wives and girlfriends don't cheat because they're bored, but because "everyone loves to get over on the jarhead."

"Like most good and great marines," he writes, "I hated the Corps. I hated being a marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be -- smart, famous, oversexed, drunk, fucked, high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy -- more than all of those things, I was a marine. A jarhead. A grunt."

But Swofford is smart, and, like most of his fellow Marines, he knows he suffers and may die to secure America's access to oil fields he'll never profit from. "None of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle -- the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street." This is how it works now; a nation's rulers no longer lead their people into battle as Charlemagne once did. Even the middle class mostly manages to keep itself out of the fray. The soldiers come from a social strata that's not "us," which makes it that much easier for those who watch from the sidelines to wax hawkish -- and turns the lives of fighting men into an object of marveling curiosity.

Not surprisingly, his tour of duty makes Swofford feel like a chump, and in the portions of "Jarhead" that describe his life after he gets out of the Marines, he wants nothing more than to shake off his former identity. Hatred of the Corps feeds into self-hatred for being the type of guy who enlisted, like a snake eating its own tail. The feeling that he and his comrades "would always be jarheads" plagues him. There are varieties of pain in "Jarhead," submerged beneath the terrors of battle and the pangs of a rotten crotch, so exquisite they'd do a torturer proud.

The biographical information on the book's jacket flap explains that Swofford attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and it's easy to imagine him there, this guy who read "The Iliad" during breaks in weapons training. I can picture him striving to make a new, better life that transcends the "loneliness and poverty of spirit" of his jarhead adventures, while surrounded by fresh-faced, unscarred young aspirants who envy him his fabulous, fabulous material.

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