Jarhead

Our local branch of Borders recently had a reduced price bonanza. I picked up a couple of items that aroused my curiosity. For example I grabbed an audio book entitled "Destined for Destiny: The unauthorized autobiography of George W. Bush". Unfortunately it was a real dud, and I am wondering how best to discard the thing.

But the book Jarhead by Anthony Swofford was bound for better things as I had already heard critical acclaim for it. It is basically a war memoir from a marine who fought in the first Gulf War. He was part of a highly skilled sniper and reconnaissance unit.

His account is stunning for a number of reasons. Foremost is his dead honesty. In his first encounter with the enemy he describes in great detail how he urinated in his pants. He pulls no punches, whether they are aimed at himself or his family, his unit, the marines, the legacy of a dead platoon-mate or their family military pedigrees. Thus in some way the book is an angry rant, but that would be an oversimplification. Swofford does a fine job of reconstructing the complexity of emotion involved with being on the front lines of a war. There is fear, doubt, cowardice, professional pride, machismo, boredom, brutality, the need to be loved, loneliness and more.

Another striking feature of his story is its very vulgarity. The book brims with bodily fluids, from sweat to urine to vomit to semen (blood is strangely absent). Swofford's marines are brutal and vulgar killers - they are not heroes but grunts. They do not do things because they believe in ideals, but for their own selfish reasons - maybe because they enjoy brutality as a means of exacting revenge for brutality of their own training. Much of the time they are drunk and spoiling for a (non-lethal) fight either with each other or with local American civilians.

An odd moment comes just before the major onslaught. Facing the possibility of death, their commander tells them to destroy anything among their personal effects that their family would not like seeing. This spurs them to build a bonfire out of their collective porn and salacious correspondence.

When the war finally comes it is over before it begins. Just when their initial reluctance and fear have subsided, they have a thirst for action. Instead they collect the weapons from myriad Iraqi corpses and discharge them on a few broken enemy vehicles. In the days that follow, one of Swofford's platoon-mates returns incessantly to a corpse he has particularly enmity for and proceeds bayonet or otherwise defile it until the author can no longer bear it and buries the hapless Iraqi.

It is strange to think that this is the story of what is widely perceived as a just war. A war to protect the national sovereignty of Kuwait from a brutal megalomaniac. This is a war in which everything was done right. The elder Bush was honest with the American people: he told them that war was justified on humanitarian grounds but also to protect the oil supply in the Persian Gulf. Bush first exhausted diplomatic channels and then worked hard to build a true multi-national coalition. To this day Kuwait hosts the most pro-American population in the Arab world and the war is a model for upholding the security of nations and international law.

Swofford has little to say about all this except tangentially. At the end of the day, his purpose is not to persuade but to recount one man's experience as honestly as possible - as opposed to the contrived stories told in bars by jarhead braggarts, or the whitewashed tales of heroism fitted for public consumption by the media. In his own words, his story is "neither true nor false but what I know".

This book is a good starting point from which to ruminate about the state of our fighting forces. This at a time when the military is stretched to the breaking point and its reputation tarnished. One wonders and marvels at what Swofford's tale would have looked like under the younger Bush's command. And what about gays and women in the military? Should we have mandatory military service for all healthy adults or should we reduce military recruiting?