Anthony Swofford’s book, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, published in 2003, describes more than just a recent generation’s experience with war and Marine Corps culture. It is also a timeless reflection on “other battles,” the internal striving at the heart of young boys that makes them join the Marines. This striving for acceptance, community and family provides the “other battles” of Swofford’s subtitle. It is something that I—as a former Marine who served at the same time as Swofford—knew intimately.
Swofford’s retelling of his training and his involvement on the frontlines of the war in the Persian Gulf hits the reader with a narrative voice filled with an embittered and measured cynicism. In his not-so-subtle opposition to the war, Swofford portrays then-President George Herbert Walker Bush as a Texan opportunist with oil on his mind, deploying a nation’s military in order to secure corporate payoffs for him and his family.
Swofford’s view of the war as pointless grows from his views on the American capitalistic system: Oil feeds the U.S. industrial machine, which in turn works to satisfy corporate profiteers who tyrannically demand bottom-line results from atop their posh offices in Manhattan and Houston. The fact that he makes these points throughout the beginning of the book demonstrates Swofford’s need for a scapegoat.
“Like many combatants before us, we laugh,” he says, upon arriving in the Arabian desert. “We laugh to obscure the tragedy of our cheap, squandered lives being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House.”
Regardless of how much oil played a part in the war, the world-renowned, illegal invasion of Kuwait by Iraq that sent American troops over to the Gulf is a factor thoroughly downplayed by Swofford in his book.
But this is understandable. For the troubled former Marine knows that a justifiable and clear-cut war, in the end, would not convincingly indict the America and the Corps culture that he blames for his own internal conflicts. In some ways, Swofford needs a controversial war.
Yet this is not the whole story. He does not make out his inner turmoil to be the exclusive result of the Gulf war alone. The other battles emerge here.
Swofford says he enlisted in the Marines—following his father’s military service in Vietnam and his grandfather’s in World War II—out of his “intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood.” This brotherly manhood seemed evasive to him as a youth. He seemed to fear if he could ever fully achieve it. So he joins the Marines, he explains, in order to “impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home.”
But finding a home the Marine Corps way comes only after a grueling, sadomasochistic rite of passage.
The uninitiated are hazed, constantly harassed and openly humiliated. Some are surreptitiously beaten. The ritual effect is augmented with sleep deprivation, constant and maddening screaming and bone-aching forced marches. While the mental torment peaks for the recruits, they are gripped by a pervasive, feverish homesickness. Fear has overwhelmed them. If they go numb, they make it. They enter the fleet.
The unnerving reality of the barracks culture in the fleet Marine Corps related by Swofford shocks the reader.
Swofford rightly mocks older Americans for thinking that the savage, repulsive acts of so-called antiwar films such as Platoon, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket as a deterrent to war for young men out of high school. In fact, he watches such films with his comrades, and they enjoy them.
The wild excitement exists, Swofford continues, “because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of [our] fighting skills.”
Explaining it even more coarsely he argues that “[t]he filmic images of death and carnage are like pornography for the military man.”
Swofford is trying to explain the way in which young American men, looking for belonging and manhood, can view graphic war movies, which juxtapose blood with brotherhood, guts with camaraderie, wounds with sympathy, medals with honor and violence with sex. The effect is quixotic, he says.
Someone desperate enough will blindly drive his car downtown and sign where the recruiter tells him. It is all adding up. Someone believes he will soon become a man.
The confusing truth of the Corps, in a way, is that it works.
But as the book progresses, Swofford properly discerns the harrowing mental price Marines must pay to be a member of this clan. The ghoulish thrill of breaking bread with highly-trained killers ultimately leaves Swofford empty, hungry. He regrets ever enlisting.
“Like most good and great Marines, I hated the Corps. I realized that joining the Marines had been a poor decision.”
It’s a decision that lands him in a war zone.
For nearly seven months, his Surveillance, Target and Acquisition platoon (STA, pronounced stay) waits on the frontlines, at the Saudi Arabian border with Kuwait, without any signs of combat. While there, during a trip offering hot showers and hot chow in the “rear” (a term used to describe a tent-city headquarters and supply area), Swofford puts an M16 rifle in his mouth. Though there are issues of an old girlfriend and impending combat surrounding this dark point in his life, Swofford’s first guess—that it’s related to “the history of my family”—seems to be the most influential factor here.
Once the air war begins and it has softened all enemy targets, the ground war seems over before it starts:
“Our entire ground war lasted as long as a long-range [Vietnam] jungle patrol,” he writes.
The questions that ensue for Swofford and the men in his unit are a result of this anticlimactic finish. “Was that combat?” he asks. He struggles to accept that it was not the same kind of war he had seen in the movies.
“The months of training and deployment, the loneliness, the boredom, the fatigue, the nights of firewatch and finally the letdown, the easy victory that just scraped the surface of war—all of these are frustrating and nearly unendurable facets of our war, our conflict. Did we fight?”
This uncertainty struggles in the heart of many young Marines. The chance to prove one’s self and to come out “a man” for living up to the challenge is why we join. For Marines who never pull the trigger, the struggle doesn’t end.
“To be a Marine, a true Marine, you must kill. Sometimes you wish you’d killed an Iraqi soldier. [D]uring the darkest nights you’d even offer your life to go back in time, back to the desert for the chance to kill.” Because he did not kill someone, Swofford is haunted by the thought that says he is not “a true Marine.”
But is a “true Marine” the only kind of real man? Does killing “the enemy,” another human being, prove one’s manhood?
For us it did.
In the middle of Mogadishu’s “No Man’s Land” one day, the muzzle of my rifle was trained on the forehead of a faction fighter 20 feet away from my position as I ran at him, M16A2 rifle up in my shoulder. He was a Somali, on the back of a technical vehicle.
I screamed and cursed for him to drop his AK47. He ignored me. My thumb clicked the rifle’s selector to three-round burst. He pointed his AK lazily my way.
I pressed harder and harder on the trigger as I came up closer to him and let the muzzle stop a few inches from his face. I could see he was high on khat, a plant that Somalis chewed to get high. His bloodshot eyes smiled at me with drugged mockery. I pulled him down from the technical onto the road.
Five months spent in Mogadishu amid pathetic sniper potshots, poorly aimed incoming RPG rounds and friendly fire from an adjacent Army position was basically the extent of the action I encountered. Was it enough? Like Swofford, I used to ask.
The Marine Corps isn’t inherently bad. But often, like a father, it offers young men promises that it can’t keep.
In the end, we all ask the same question: Was it enough?
As all the sons of the Corps reply, many still answer: Never.
It takes time to heal, to stop asking the same futile things of your father and to find a family that has what you need. Going back to the start, to find what he needs, requires courage of a Marine. Becoming a man means no more blaming. I pray for my Marine brothers.
P. Steven Ghiringhelli, a former Marine, is a 2005 graduate of Rutgers-Newark and a writer at Kairos Magazine. He has published articles in the Star-Ledger of Newark, the New Jersey Herald of Newton, and the Times-Herald Record of Middletown, N.Y. Posted August 2005.
