Jarhead

November 30, 2005

I just finished reading Jarhead by Anthony Swofford. The book centers on Swofford’s service in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper Platoon in Operation Desert Storm. Writing a first-person account of a ground war between grossly mismatched opponents that only lasts a few hours hours poses a challenge. What does the author do with the rest of the book? Swofford’s solution was to describe “a number of people reacting to the difficulties of life, war, and service in the U.S. Marines.” To this he adds a lot of autobiographical material, which too often reads like padding.

I picked up the book because of the Marines I know and respect, and because war stories interest me, probably because I was too young for the Great War and my periods of military service missed Korea and Viet Nam. I will always wonder how I would have reacted under fire, and I am very thankful that I didn’t have to find out.

Swofford was raised a Roman Catholic and was an altar-boy while in his early teens. He joined the Marines at age seventeen-and-a-half, and it took the Marines just a matter of weeks to transform the altar-boy into a trained killer, or at least to talk and act like one. His language was transformed into a more or less continuous string of profanity and blasphemy, his professed morality into sex-crazed activities, and his regard for human life was reduced to the vanishing point. One of the important messages in his book is that neither the Marines, nor war, nor any other raw aspects of life can completely squeeze the humanity out of most men. A few it kills, either mentally or physically, but most survive.

Swofford survived to go on to college and become a successful writer. Some of his friends fell victim to their de-humanizing military experiences, and in Jarhead he sympathetically tells their stories.

Here is the troubled ending of the book:

I am entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities. Indolence and cowardice do not drive me - despair drives me. I remade my war one word at a time, a foolish, desperate act. When I despair, I am alone, and I am often alone. In crowded rooms and walking the streets of our cities, I am alone and full of despair - the same despair that impelled me to write this book, a quiet scream from within a buried coffin. Dead, dead, my scream.

What did I hope to gain? More bombs are coming. Dig your holes with the hands God gave you.

Some wars are unavoidable and need to be well fought, but this doesn’t erase warfare’s waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose sons will die horribly. This will never end. Sorry.

Dave, thinking there can be nothing worse than hopelessness.

Posted by Dave | Filed Under Literature