Anthony Swofford

As I child I would eavesdrop on the men in my family talk about their war experiences which would never be brought up in front of the women or children. I didn’t understand but I knew it was scary and horrible and to never ask questions from my father (Korea), grandfather (WWI), and uncles (WWII). Over my working career I hired many veterans, some simple grunts, others Special Forces, Rangers, SEALS, etc. Most were great, dependable, hard working guys, all of whom were hiding damage. show more Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead is a brutal tale of his life and career as a Marine through the First Gulf War. Thankfully he used his writing talent to transition into successful civilian life, not without internal wounds that never heal. Not all those who serve are that lucky. Jarhead is an excellent read but not for the faint-hearted. show less

war. fuck. the shit we do to our young people, and then we expect them to come back and be productive members of society.

he's a good writer, and i'd be interested in reading the fiction that the author bio says he was working on when this came out.

this is great for memoir but also for fiction, really all writing: "Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what i know."

"Nothing is forever, and certainly not a cheap relationship fabricated on personalized paper, and I'm about to die or show more not and kill or not, but no matter what occurs I will never be the same, and that is the only thing that might last forever - exile, change, change the only sustenance I know, today is only today and tomorrow is tomorrow and a far ways way and then you might die or walk farther with your heavy rucksack and your weapons."

"Yes, I'm sorry the men are dead, for many reasons I'm sorry, and chief among my reasons is that the men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom, and the more men who survive the war, the higher the number of men who might speak." show less

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 show more 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, but so goes the life of a soldier. 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less