Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other BattlesAnthony Swofford's Jarhead is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is a searing, unforgettable narrative. When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker. Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man. Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life. A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose but also for the depth of its pained heart. |
Contents
Section 18 | 133 |
Section 19 | 141 |
Section 20 | 151 |
Section 21 | 161 |
Section 22 | 169 |
Section 23 | 175 |
Section 24 | 189 |
Section 25 | 203 |
Section 9 | 83 |
Section 10 | 85 |
Section 11 | 97 |
Section 12 | 107 |
Section 13 | 111 |
Section 14 | 119 |
Section 15 | 121 |
Section 16 | 123 |
Section 17 | 127 |
Section 26 | 211 |
Section 27 | 217 |
Section 28 | 237 |
Section 29 | 247 |
Section 30 | 249 |
Section 31 | 253 |
Section 32 | 255 |
Section 33 | 257 |
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Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles Anthony Swofford Limited preview - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
ANTHONY SWOFFORD artillery Atticus barracks bastards battalion Berm bitch bombs boot camp brother burn combat corpse Cortes Crocket dead desert Dettmann Dickerson dog tags Drill Instructor drink drunk Ellie Bows enemy father feel Fergus fighting holes fire Fowler fuck gas mask gear girl girlfriend goddamn grunt Gulf War guys hands head hear hootch Humvee indoc infantry JARHEAD Johnny Johnny Rotten join kill knew Kristina Kuehn Kuwait Kuwait City letters living look Marine Corps Marine girls MOPP morning mother motherfucker never night Okinawa patrol pills piss pull recruiter rounds ruck sand Saudi Saudi Arabia says scout/sniper scream Scud shit shoot shot sleep sniper rifle Staff Sergeant Staff Sergeant Siek stop story talk target tell told troops Troy Vietnam walk watch weapons weeks wife woman women yells
Popular passages
Page 7 - Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.
Page 5 - Bush], we march in a platoon formation to the base barber and get fresh high-andtight haircuts. And no wonder we call ourselves jarheads — our heads look just like jars. Then we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. They also buy a hell of a lot of beer. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various...
Page ix - Tomaso in rough dialect, with h for c All right, I am dead, but do not want to go to heaven, I want to go on fighting & I want your body to go on with the struggle. And I answered: "my body is already old, I need it, where wd. I go? But I will give you a place in a Canto giving you voice. But if you want to go on fighting go take some young chap, flaccid & a half-wit to give him a bit of courage and some brains...
Page 7 - Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi mother fuckers."1...