A tough book for me to read, I thought that maybe he let too much out about our culture in the Marine Corps. Things that should be only experienced not read. I throw the bullshit flag on several of his recollections. A good author and easy to read ( )

This book is even better when read along with Live from Baghdad, it's the same war, but one book is written from the outside and the other inside.
This book is also helpful if you know young men in the military- not necessarily close family members, but acquaintances. ( )

I love - repeat LOVE - this book. And not in the overused, flighty sense of the word. What's not to love in a book with nonstop action with blood-boiling gunfights? But that is not Swofford's story. I have read many books that recount the exciting details of war but lack the pure human drama Swofford brings to the page. We go inside the mind of a soldier impatiently waiting for action, yet fearing and dreading when that moment will find him - and we wait with him, knowing he will tell us the truth about The Moment when he lines up his first mark, pulls the trigger, and realizes that he has taken another man's life. It never comes. When I turned the last page and saw the sun rising through my bedroom window, I wondered why I had been so enthralled and unable to put the book down. Somehow I still am not sure why I love Jarhead, but I think it is Swofford's brutal honesty that pours out of the page and forces us to confront the human side of war and look beyond the statistics. ( )

I don't gravitate to books about war, in fact I admit to having no interest at all in the subject. But I read this book on the recommendation of a writing teacher who suggested I look at the book's structure, taking away lessons from Tony Swofford's brilliant memoir of his experience as a marine in the Gulf War.

Structurally, Swofford moves us efforlessly through time - backstory and future story woven through with ease. The forward story takes us through his training exercises as well as his experiences in his unit, as they sit for months in the sand, waiting for the war to start. We get an inside look at the war machine, including some of the absurdities in how we train our young soldiers to fight. He builds credible characters whom we grow to care about, and we get inside his head as he tries to make sense of the endless waiting, the preparation for the war that never really starts.

His writing is so strong, my first impulse was to say, "Ghostwritten" - no way a grunt wrote this book! Turns out though that Swofford has an Iowa MFA, he's no common grunt at all (my first clue should've been that he reads Homer while sitting in a foxhole.) The brilliance of the writing here is that he makes you think you're reading the thoughts/words of a common grunt - a testament to his understanding of building a persona.

If you're an aspiring memoirist, this one can be very instructive. But probably worth a read even if you're not. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2005/05... ( )