Rating: 
Summary: Dose of reality
Review: I have just finished reading Jarhead and I found it a heavy dose of reality. With Gulf War II looming, it was an usettling book to read...Swofford's experiences (especially of waiting for the war to start) paralled the ones being experienced right now by the men and women stationed in the Gulf.
The book captures the life of a Marine, the average Marine. There is plenty of ugliness under the crisp uniforms. There is also despair, fear, and other emotions bubbling under the surface. Swofford laid it all out for all to see. We tend to forget that there are human beings in those uniforms...not simple killing machines.
The first war in the Gulf was highly sanitized in the media...war is not sanitary. We never saw many pictures of dead bodies strewn across the desert...it was if there was death but it was so clean. Swofford's book dispels that aura by dropping corpses in front of us to show what the cost of war really is and that it is not all surgical airstrikes and smart bombs.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a less glorified picture of military life. Sometimes you have to move beyond the glossy brochures and glitzy recruitment ads and see what it is all about.
I was able to hear Mr. Swofford read from his book at American River College recently. The words shocked and offended some, but most stayed on to hear what he had to say. The audience also asked him questions and he graciously answered them. I wish him luck with his future literary endeavors.
Rating: 
Summary: response to J.J. Pulit
Review: from the Chicago Manual of Style:"7.96 Full titles of armies, navies, airforces, fleets, regiments, battalions, companies, corps, and so forth are capitalized. The words army, navy, and so forth are lowercased when standing alone or used collectively in the plural or when they are not part of an official title: United States Marine Corps; the Marine Corps, the U.S. Marines; the marines."
Rating:
Summary: A real war story -- not for the faint of heart
Review: To the uninitiated, this book will at times seem vulgar, crude, unvarnished, sick, and amoral. But in many ways, those descriptions are an essential part of the story. Military life has never been easy -- since the days when Roman soldiers marched on Gaul to the days when Civil War soldiers marched 20 miles a day with little more than a biscuit -- the life of an infantryman has been nasty, brutish and short. Anthony Swofford adds his war story to this pantheon; his voice is startingly and brutally honest. A military historian once said that the study of combat by those who have not seen it is akin to the study of sex by virgins, with only pornography to look at. Swofford's book fits that maxim well, though don't expect the neat or sensitive pornography of war that we've gotten out of the mainstream press lately. Jarhead tells its war stories the only way a Marine can -- hardcore, no holds barred, no censorship.
Rating: 
Summary: Juvenile war stories and bathroom humor
Review: As a parent with a son currently serving in the Middle East, the timing of this book was perfect. I hoped to learn some of what he is experiencing and something new about that part of the world. Didn't get it from this piece of Jr. High war story literature. There are a very few pages about the region and its people, a very few pages about the military actions he was involved in and the rest of the book is about his chafing problems (don't ask - you don't want to know - trust me!). More of a Jr. High macho man autobiography than anything else.
Rating: 
Summary: Great writing, very timely with the current Irag situation
Review: Weaving together universal themes that affect the average American male in his late teens and early twenties with the very unique (and virtually undocumented) experiences of a front-line sniper during the first gulf war. This book is artful in it's treading of the thin line between insincere flag-waving and flat out anti-Americanism. Swofford is at times astonishingly honest about what really goes on in the head and heart of a very young man trained and programmed to [destroy] for the USMC. He is not in the Saudi Arabian desert because he feels passionate about defending the autonomy of Kuwait, he's in the Corps because the recruiter told him about all of the ... conquests available to the nubile seventeen year old who sat in the office, impressionable and naive. Swofford brings to this book an honesty and integrity that is basically unseen or unheard-of in other Marine Corps literature, and on top of this brings with him an utterly readable and enjoyable work of literature. If you are interested in what life in Desert Storm was REALLY like, this should be just the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: war is hell
Review: war is hell, always was, always will be. This articulate and timely book brings home the old adage that people might feel patriotic and wave flags and sing songs as long as somebody else is doing the fighting but an incinerated corpse is a great equalizer and banishes the thoughts of us versus them. Mr Swofford is a talented writer and he makes the carnage, physical as well as emotional, palpable. After you turn off the jingoistic news broadcasts with their "war as the latest reality show" bravado read this, for oxygen and moral clarity.
Rating:
Summary: Brutal, profane, and brilliant
Review: In "Jarhead" Anthony Swofford has created a memoir that ranks with "Dispatches" and "My War Gone By, I Miss it So". His brutal honesty, when combined with his superb writing, produces a portrait of war that is both appalling and moving. Swofford's book isn't one of tactics, weapons and politics; rather, it is one of brotherhood, terror, hope and despair. While the book isn't written in chronological order, it details (albeit unevenly) Swofford's life from childhood through his enlistment in the Marines and the years following the Gulf War. As one might expect, the bulk of the narrative covers his time in the Marines, although there are a few particularly poignant moments that took place before and after his service. As a narrative of Marine life, "Jarhead" is fascinating. Swofford provides the best look atf life in the Marines I have ever encountered (and that includes Sledge's superb "With the Old Breed"). From his indoctrination through his deployments in the Pacific and Desert Storm, the reader is given a string of snapshots of life as a Marine that are by turns funny, appalling, terrifying and touching, but always fascinating. That said, "Jarhead" is much more; it is Swofford's chronicle of his journey into manhood, and how the horrors of war shaped the man he would become. Swofford reveals himself as a realist when he states in the final pages, "Some wars are unavoidable and need well be fought." However, he reveals the battlefield view of war when he continues, "but this doesn't erase warfare's waste." Swofford is no pacifist, but he has seen what war can do to a man, what war did to himself. Above all, I suspect that "Jarhead" was a cathartic effort for Swofford, an attempt to overcome his demons by revealing them to the light of day. At the same time, though, he has created a cautionary tale for those who make the decision to go to war; essentially, he is revealing the true price of war so that we might better determine if the use of force is worth the cost. Ultimately, "Jarhead" is a fascinating look at one man's journey into manhood through war. It is not an easy read, and is profoundly sad at some points, but it is a brilliantly written and immensely important book. One would hope that all of the soldiers the U.S. produces are so thoughtful, so well equipped to fulfill their mission even as they are revolted by its effects. Likewise, one would hope that our leaders would read this book, and think long and hard before they send more brave, intelligent boys to face the abominations Swofford so compellingly recounts.
Rating: 
Summary: One Brave Guy!
Review: In "Jarhead" Anthony Swofford paints a vivid, albeit surreal, landscape of a Marine snipe/scout in the desert of the first Gulf War. Without regard for demeaning himself in the eyes of Marines who actually saw combat, he shows us the horror and psychological damage one can sustain from the natural consequences of war: the needless destruction of civilian infrastructure, death of men, comrades and, apparently worse, several camels. He tosses a veritable incoherent word salad as he attempts to describe the confusion, angst and even light-hearted moments of the modern combat soldier. "... I throw the pear, and when it lands, sand attaches to the moist fruit, like memory to the soft parts of the brain." Obviously, his attempt falls well wide of the mark. Swofford lets it all hang out, sparing us, his readers, nothing. Twice, we are told, that his fear was such that he urinated on himself. The fact that in his four-day war, he saw no actual combat is of no moment. This is a man brave enough to say that some of us, particularly in these trying times, are a little prone to urinating on ourselves for causes both internal and remote. Swofford speaks in a voice, neither altogether strange nor familiar, that whispers of timelessness, of being beyond the transcendent effervescence of purpose. Reading his words we feel his knowing eye peering into his deepest, most personal self, violating his defenses, tearing them away with his reason and leaving him face to face with his intimate deceptions. Can any war be justified? He forces us to confront with him things at the very nature of, and composed within the all encompassing All, struggling to free himself and become known. He tells us that "The warrior always fights for a sorry cause." In other words, Swofford's view of the Gulf War will be embraced and applauded primarily by new age, counter culture flakes. Others will see the book for what it is. Thank you Mr. Swofford for this book and your war, the likes of which no real Marine and no civilian with a sense of honor or self pride has seen before.
Rating:
Summary: lacks integrety: persepective of a Marine Grunt
Review: Mark Bowden's review for the New York Times proclaimed Anthony Swofford's book Jarhead "the most honest memoir I have read from a participant in any recent war." Having served in the Gulf War with the Marines attached to Task Force Ripper, I found Swofford's description of Marines and the war as pure fantasy. Swofford's host of fictitious characters are a copulation of individual negative acts used to help support his anti-military agenda. This bringing together of "liberty" legends would be like representing Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dommer, and Timothy McVey as your typical American boys. I was appalled at how Swofford had represented my comrades as drunken immoral degenerates propelled by testosterone with a driving need to kill. Not to mention how he portrayed our wives and girlfriends as sleeping around while we were away fighting. I am also of the opinion that Swofford's agenda was more important than the truth. This is reinforced by inaccuracies in his facts. The Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks occurred on October 23, 1983 not in 1984 (p.127) as he had stated. The superior color of the Combat Action Ribbon is blue and not red (p.76-77). Least important, yet still demonstrating a lack of concern for detail, the M-16 A2's muzzle velocity is listed in the Battle Drills guide as 3,250 feet per second not 3,100. (p.105) Finally, the title Marine is a proper noun and therefore always capitalized and as a scribe in boot camp Mr. Swofford should have known that. That is unless he did this throughout the book as a final insult. Perhaps Mr. Swofford feels that the Marine Corps has wronged him and this is his way of getting retribution. Although Anthony Swofford's ability to write lends itself to enhancing the story it should be remembered as just that a story. Like Hollywood, Mr. Swofford has taken many liberties with his vision of reality.
Rating:
Summary: Literary Jarhead
Review: Jarhead is a riveting memoir of a 20-year-old's coming of age as fodder for our ill-planned and prematurely ended last campaign in Iraq, but it's also an artfully written narrative. Most of us will seize on this book insofaras it supports or condemns our view of Bush II's latest adventure, but it's also a literary work. It will make you uncomfortable, squirmingly so at times, and you will not emerge with an hollow sense of American heroism in a patriotic undertaking, nor will this fit the handy and noble fictions of young men under fire a la Ollie North, ex-soldier (and felon) for hire. This is a vivid, funny and disturbing book, flatout the best contemporary writing on war since Tim O'Brien, Michael Herr and Thom Jones. And I can't think of a better preparation for what lies ahead of us in Baghdad.
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