Book: Jarhead
Author: Anthony Swofford
Published: 2003 (Scribner)
Pages: 363
We had to read part of this in freshman English, the part
where all the marines are showing off for a visiting reporter by playing touch
football and eventually pretend gang-raping in their full desert protection
suits. That’s a good place to start, because it shows the aggression and fear
and hysteria and bravado and sand and grit and hostility that all these marines
carried with them through basic training to Desert Storm.
Swofford’s a good writer. He’s eloquent, good at
distinguishing everyday events that have underlying psychological terrors
versus ones that are just a pain in the ass. He stands a little bit apart from
the rest of the troop, not any more educated really but more inclined to
introspection, but he understands and shares their compulsions. He goes a
little crazy, too.
I liked going along with him as he tried to figure out what
all this meant to him. He never really wanted it but it was all he had, and
that gets his cynicism going wonky when he could really stand to just shut it
up until he got this goddamn war over with.
He was probably the best normal guy to chronicle this sort
of thing exactly because he wasn’t truly a “normal” guy in the marines but he wanted
to be so badly until the absurdity (and all those cheating girlfriends, a whole
wall of them from the squad) wore him down.
Bookshelf. I need to start separating my memoirs from my
essay collections from my factual non-fiction. It’s getting messy.
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