Military

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JARHEAD – A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War
By [unknown placeholder $article.author$]
19 Oct. 2003 - 1:47:00 PM

JARHEAD – A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War

by Anthony Swofford, pub. Scribner 2003

Why read another soldier’s tale of old campaigns and half-forgotten horrors, the book is one of the reasons.  War is an extraordinary event, when large numbers of young men are permitted to go and kill other groups of young men, and anyone else in the way, breaking the normal taboos that we live by. 

This raises a number of issues; how are men trained to kill, what are their feelings, how do soldiers fit in with the societies which support them and send them to fight and what was the experience of a particular war, how was it seen at the battle-front as opposed to the isolation of the command HQ.

Anthony Swofford, joined the US Marine Corps at 17½, as soon as he could sign himself up for enlistment and he became a scout/sniper in the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon (STA) of the Second Battalion of the US 7^th Marines.  As a twenty year old lance corporal he was one of the first American servicemen deployed to Saudi Arabia following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.  The term Jarhead refers to the haircut given to US Marines, very short.

Swofford firstly gives an account of the process of Marine training.  His language is raw and personal:

“I was in the stink and the shit, the gutter of the Marine Corps, the gutter of the world, and I know that I had made a mistake, but perhaps I’d discover ME in the gutter, perhaps I’d discover ME in the same way centuries of men had discovered themselves, while at war, while in the center of the phalanx, drowning in the stink and the shit and the rubble and the piss and the flesh.”

He describes at length the long waiting and the boredom of the initial deployment, and then the buzz of war marching into Kuwait:

“The enemy at caught in an unfortunate catch-22, in that I care for them as men and fellow unfortunates as long as they are not within riflesight or they’ve busy being dead, but as soon as I see them living, I wish to turn upon them my years of training and suffering, and I want to perform on them some of the despicable acts I’ve learned over the prior few ye4ars, such as trigger-killing them from one thousand yards distant, or gouging their hearts with my sharp bayonet.”

Swofford is philosophical in the presence of dead Iraqis:

“The dead Iraqis are poor company, but the presence of so much death reminds me that I’m alive, whatever awaits me to the north.  I realize that I may never again be so alive.  I can see everything and nothing – this moment with the dead men has made my past worth living and my future, always uncertain, now has value”.

In conclusion Swofford says that he is entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities and the waste of war, though some wars need to be fought.