I’m tempering my short fiction reviews with something a little harder – books about war. I’ll review five in all, starting with Jarhead, Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir.
As a lance corporal in a US Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon, Swofford was trained to kill, but didn’t ever get the chance. His memoir, first published in 1997, led a wave of more ‘thoughtful’ war diaries – see also Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers Reading Club – that examine the military experience through a personal, human lens: the experience of being a warrior.
A memoir is a strange breed, not so much a series of events as a series of events as seen through the lens of hindsight. The troublesome –if most interesting – bit is the space between what actually happened and the author’s retelling of it. Swofford cops straight to this: “What follows is neither true nor false but what I know.”
It’s a fair disclaimer: what he knows now, not necessarily what he knew then.
Stories of war benefit from this hindsight because without it, they are chains of events, tales necessarily dehumanised by their tellers because the military institution requires demands that. I have never been to war, but I am willing to stake my life on this: you cannot pull the trigger on someone’s father, someone’s lover, someone’s son, but you can pull the trigger on an enemy.
War dehumanises because it must. But afterwards, when that soldier is out of theatre and shaking old sand out of his desert rucksack, as Swofford is at the start of his book, then the most interesting story unfolds, hindsight and all: “I’ve been working toward this – I’ve opened the ruck and now I must open myself.”
Cleverly, this memoir tells two stories. One, the story of a soldier’s experience of war, smoothed by hindsight, and two, story of how he came to tell it, and of the frayed edges that threatened to unravel his grip on who he was and what he had done (or not done). This latter story interested me more, but Swofford’s book brings the two together in a very readable, memorable way. It’s not a light read, but nor should it be.
Swofford’s war story begins on August 2nd 1990. Iraqi troops have marched into Kuwait City and in California, US troops have been put on standby. Gorging themselves on beer and war movies, he and his platoon rev themselves up for what they believe is to come:
We are all afraid, but show this in various ways – violent indifference, fake ease, standard issue bravura. We are afraid, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to fight. It occurs to me that we will never be young again.
Swofford’s experience of war is of violence, order, failure, boredom, fear and love – not of country or mission, but of his brothers in arms. The heart of this memoir, though, is a rumination on the futility and frustration of un-becoming a warrior. Getting to war was easy, but getting away from it is nearly impossible.
Years after discharge, Fergus, an old platoon mate, reaches out to Swofford after executing a neighbourhood bully vigilante-style with his military-issue rifle. Swofford, coping with this part of his past and himself only by consciously ignoring it, suggests his friend seek some help. Fergus’s response is less defensive than it is accusatory: “We fired the same rifle. You have the same problems as me.”
Jarhead skips between Swofford’s sobering present-day struggle to unpack his own baggage, and the span of time that led up to it. Years spent learning to kill, days spent breaking down his rifle, hours passed reciting the same oaths of allegiance to his rifle and his unit, these all come back to slap him, hard, when the war ends without his doing the one thing he was sent there to do.
There is no upside to Swofford’s war experience: he hasn’t killed anyone – not even himself, though he came close on that count – but in some sort of uneven bargain, something in him has died anyway:
If you’d killed those men, you would’ve told your mother, “No, I never killed anyone,” and even though you have indeed killed no one and have told your mother this, she has still said, numerous times, while weeping, “I lost my baby boy when you went to war. You were once so sweet and gentle and now you are an angry and unhappy man.”
Jarhead is genuinely well-written – Swofford has an admirable ease with language and a real skill for short, telling descriptions. Subject-wise, his book is easy to read because despite the guns and military trappings, the story it tells is unmistakably, universally human.
Though at the time I was angry that the pompous captain took the handset from me and stole my kills, I have lately been thankful that he insisted on calling the fire mission, and sometimes when I am feeling hopeful or even religious, I think that by taking my two kills the pompous captain handed me life, some extra moments of living for myself or that I can offer others, though I have no idea how to use or disburse these extra moments, or if I’ve wasted them already.
Life changes us. We cannot stop this. But sometimes we can see it happening and summon the strength to wrestle these forces that conspire against us into a kind of submission. And if we are lucky, as I hope Swofford is, we may even learn from them.
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