Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
Written by Anthony Swofford
Narrated by Anthony Swofford
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
When the U.S. Marines -- or "jarheads" -- were sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 for the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford was there. He lived in sand for six months; he was punished by boredom and fear; he considered suicide, pulled a gun on a fellow marine, and was targeted by both enemy and friendly fire. As engagement with the Iraqis drew near, he was forced to consider what it means to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.
Anthony Swofford
Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.
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Reviews for Jarhead
483 ratings15 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Memoirs of this sort only encourage incredulity. My memory of reading this has obviusly bem deformed by subsequent history. Swofford aims for Dave Eggers territory, especially the settling of accounts with Dads Behaving Badly but I found whole enterprise indifferent.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Anthony Swofford has blown the whistle on the crudities and spiritual failure of Life in the Marine Corps, and its particular failures in the First Gulf War. Intellectually and Spiritually there's not much new here, but this file does have to be upgraded after any new war.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Written in raw, graphic language, Swofford seems to hold nothing back from readers on what it's like to be a Marine fighting in the Gulf War. He embraces the romantic brotherhood of the soldier while at the same time exposing its seedy side. Marines are broken down and rebuilt, as Swofford describes it, into ruthless killing machines. But, much to the disappointment of Swofford's unit, there is little killing in their war. Ultimately, Swofford and his fellow Marines must wrestle with what it means to be a soldier and Marine, and what their place is back home among their families, jobs, and society. During their time served, they deal with life using any available distraction: primarily prostitutes, booze, and letters from home. From Swofford's descriptions, the vices go right along with the glory in the psyche of the soldier. It's a shocking revelation for civilians, but one can't help but excuse them when Swofford describes the aftermath of war. While crudeness and profanity make the first half of the novel tough, the same language becomes tragically beautiful in his description of the Iraqi bunkers and what he found there. The repetition of phrases and the metaphors make for amazing reading. You really feel the author's soul in these lines, right down to the core of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You can really tell that these scenes haunt him at night. Swofford's experience as a soldier helps him to create language that both repulses and moves the reader. It's a good perspective on what life is like for those who fight, how they prepare their minds and bodies for war, as well as an unvarnished look at the military who looks upon these people as fodder.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5a wonderfully written book. poetic and disturbing. heartrending and beautiful. i really enjoyed it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's not a big book, but it's not an easy read either. The style is nice, the chapters short, but the atmosphere of this book is very, very disturbing. I'd seen the film and I'm happy I decided I had to read the book too.This book describes how a jarhead actually feels and thinks. Anthony Swofford was a sniper in Operation Desert Shield (later Desert Storm) and he tells about his training and his time in the desert. All I'm left with afterwards is sadness....good book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A war memoir that is harsh, at times brutal, but also very thoughtful as well. I can understand how Abu Gharib happened, reading this, but I can also see why there is such shame in the military in the aftermath of it. A portrait of the double life men trained to kill but expected to sometimes be humane and eventually to rejoin society, struggle to lead. Hard to pigeonhole, and provides no easy answers, which is probably appropriate for such a book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The novel, Jarhead, encompasses the military life where Anthony Swofford explains how his life was like through the Gulf War. In the beggining Anthony Swofford the protaginist is commisioned in Afghanistan and he recounts his experiences in the Marine culture, the blood lust, the alternating boredom and terror, and the absurd moments including wearing camouflage uniforms because their desert ones hadn't arrived yet, the protaginist struggles with all the B.S that he portrays through the military life. Throughout the middle of the book he perserves the military life and almost killing a man. (178/272)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Read this before going to see the movie and was actually disappointed in the movie. But then, how could you make a movie out of the surreal enviroment that Swafford paints of the Gulf War? Great book!!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Swofford has an engaging style, really gives a feel for what being a Marine during the First Gulf War was like. I had seen the movie first, so I was a bit surprised at how dark and - dare I say - depressing the book was in comparison. Not that I would expect the experience of going to war to be amusing in any way, but the movie came at the story from a slightly more light-hearted and absurd angle. No punches pulled, the book offers more in the way of commentary and less anecdotes than I had anticipated. Even so, a very good read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An account of one marine's life and experiences in the first Gulf War. An eye-opening story of our "elite" armed forces.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Swofford certainly has his own ideas on war. But more interesting is his study of the Marine psyche and how it's possible to be constantly ready to battle while you're bored stiff.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Damn. This is one hardhitting book, and a very good one at that. Swofford lays out his Marine experiences for all to see, good and bad, and does so without making any comentary on the political veracities behind warfighting. His message to the reader: whatever the reason for going to war, never forget the cost to those who wage it and upon whom war is waged.