More than just his journal was slim. His former self was a lean twenty-year-old whose uniform he unearthed in Iowa. His camouflage issues seemed oddly foreign, like the clothes of another man entirely. They bore the marks of his experience in the desert, “ratty and bleached by sand and sun and blemished with the petroleum rain that fell from the oil-well fires in Kuwait.” Standing in the basement of his rental house in Iowa City, he shed his civilian clothes to don the uniform once again, hoping to conjure the spirit of his military bearing. Stepping into the familiar pants that traveled the world with him, he realized that due to his sizable girth, “the waist stops at my thighs.” The physical demands of his deployment that had him exercising thirty hours per week yielded a body that stood in sharp contrast to his current sedentary frame—“since I’ve been out, I’ve exercised about thirty hours a year”—turning the process into a comic struggle. “The blouse buttons, but barely.” If he was to transform his time in Kuwait into literary art, neither his “journal with its sparse entries” nor his too-small cammies offered themselves as access points to his past. Both were too narrow. The process of retrieving his prior jarhead identity would prove more difficult than perusing a diary and donning the uniform he wore when he scribbled his elliptical entries in it. “I am after something. Memory, yes. A reel. More than just time.”8
His chronicle had been years in the making: “I’ve been working toward this—I’ve opened my ruck and now I must open myself.”9 Swofford told me, “I started writing Jarhead the day after I graduated from the Workshop,” after focusing exclusively on fiction for two years. “But I’d written two hundred thousand words under the tutelage of” Frank Conroy, Chris Offutt, and Joy Williams at the Workshop. “Under them,” he explained, “I had learned the art of prose storytelling.” From writings completed for the Iowa MFA, “I pulled one eight-page chunk of autobiographical USMC boot camp stuff from my thesis and dropped it into the Jarhead manuscript.”10
Searching elsewhere in the ruck, Swofford began to piece together the documents and artifacts, particularly the letters that might spark his memory. In the 1960s, Kurt Vonnegut had no ruck to rummage through when he began assembling materials in Iowa City for Slaughterhouse-Five, his book about military service and surviving the Dresden bombings during World War II. But as with Swofford, the resource Vonnegut expected to be most valuable—in his case interviews with friends and war buddies in Europe and the U.S. who had survived the ordeal—profoundly disappointed him, leaving him to his experience and memory, the only resources he could trust. When Vonnegut consulted with a Hollywood producer about the prospects of his idea becoming a bestselling novel and subsequent film, he was admonished for his attempts to write an “anti-war book.” “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” the producer quipped.11
For Swofford, the industry for war literature and film in the twenty-first century had advanced beyond Vonnegut’s mid-twentieth-century norm of uniformly heroic pro-war narratives. Vonnegut was taking a radically unique perspective on World War II from the point of view of those on the ground beneath an Allied air raid, revealing that the Axis powers were not the only ones capable of raining hellfire on civilians in lyrical towns of storybook beauty like Dresden. Swofford also disrupts expectations for traditional war narrative. As the critic Jon Robert Adams astutely observes, Jarhead “presents the soldier’s experience of war as not matching civilian expectations of what makes a man,” particularly by requiring “them to see those they would call heroes as deeply troubled by their war experiences; as soldiers wounded in the heart; as whiners justified in complaining.”12 Swofford attests that service can leave veterans with “cheap, squandered lives” and little hope for eternal peace, for “more bombs are coming.”13 Just after the appearance of Jarhead, Swofford made his pacifist stance even more explicit. He characterized Operation Iraqi Freedom as “America’s ill-advised and corrupt war,” confessing that he fully regretted enlisting in Operation Desert Shield. Long before the internet and Wikileaks, when Swofford first joined the Marines in 1988 just two years before the launch of Desert Shield, he had little access to data detailing the violence, corruption, and atrocity of war. With such information, he “might have gone to college at eighteen rather than having signed the [Marine Corps] contract.” His signature embroiled him in a political quagmire reminiscent of Vietnam, only this time fought in the name of large multinational corporate oil interests, an imbroglio he calls the “Southwest Asia” conflicts that would later include Operation Desert Storm.14
For the literary Swofford to don the subjectivity of his unlettered warrior self was a daunting challenge, especially since his ambition was to achieve nothing less than the definitive chronicle of the Gulf War. Jarhead therefore deploys an astonishing range of voices and perspectives, from political analysis, introspective psychology, and anthropological profiling to profane colloquialism. The text functions at once as personal memoir revealing his deepest vulnerabilities, from incontinence to attempted suicide, while also forwarding a forceful argument on behalf of enlisted soldiers subjugated to political conflicts directed by government officials who will never see action. Like the soldier Kropp in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, who envisions an alternative to war whereby the leaders of nations battle one another in giant stadiums to settle their disputes, Swofford similarly voices his dissent toward the military-industrial complex that has thrown him into this predicament in the first place. Kropp, like Swofford, is a “thinker” who proposes that a declaration of war should require “the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing drawers and armed with clubs [to] have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins,” he suggests, reasoning, “this would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement where the wrong people do the fighting.”15
By contrast, the lean young Swofford was gung-ho, primed by the inadvertently pro-war Vietnam films The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, which the troops watch together in a beer-drenched frenzy. As he told the Daily Iowan just after the publication of Jarhead, “I wanted to run around and see the world and learn how to kill people.”16 Operation Desert Shield was ostensibly billed as a mission “to protect, to shield Saudi Arabia and her flowing oil fields” from encroaching Iraqi forces. Their commander charges the troops to “shield enough oil to drive hundreds of millions of cars for hundreds of millions of miles, at a relatively minor cost to the American consumer.” The troops “joke about having transferred from the Marine Corp to the Oil Corp, or the Petrol Battalion.” But Swofford observes a deeper psychological function behind their drollery, particularly how “we laugh to obscure the comedy of combat and being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House.” Behind this is a web of “oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush, and the commander’s progeny.” To the troops on the ground “who will fight and die,” the “outcome of the conflict is less important” than it is “for the old white” billionaires who have tremendous amounts of capital “to gain or lose in the oil fields, the deep, rich, flowing oil fields of the Kingdom of Saud.”17
Such incisive analysis reflects how the literary Swofford of Iowa City in 2001 carried considerably more ideological weight than his former warrior self. His cynicism at the age of twenty was a stripped-down version of this powerful combination of bitterness and disillusionment that crystallized over time on the political motives behind Operation Desert Shield. Writing in Slate after the film release of Jarhead in 2005, Nathaniel Fick affirmed the veracity of the cinematic depiction of the grunts’ perception of the political strategizing by the “bureaucrats [who] have a lot of jawboning to do” safe behind lines. “When discussion in the movie turns to whether war is just a bid for oil,” Fick writes, “one Marine turns to his buddies and says, ‘F— politics. We’re here. All the rest is bullsh—.’ ” To Fick, who
served in Kuwait in 2003, “this rings true,” because “Marines don’t pick their battles.” This sense of futility in being captive to the will of government officials renders troops’ discussion and activity on the battlefield apolitical. Since any sort of activism or protest—aside from the rash option of outright mutiny—is pointless for modern soldiers deployed in the Middle East, their lives become a waiting game of psychological preparation for conflict. The endless hours are filled not with earnest political debate, but with “silly formations, reckless football games, and endless conversations about girls left behind.”18 Any inclination toward critically analyzing their predicament is neutralized or disengaged altogether by the immediate threat of facing the enemy in combat.
If the lean Tony on the front lines had no time for politics in the social milieu of his fellow Marines, the ample one brought the full weight of his sizable literary training and sophisticated frame of reference to bear on the subject. As a Workshop student writing fiction in 1999, Swofford explored the outer dimensions of the military experience considered taboo or off-limits at the turn of the twenty-first century. He freighted his memory with the weight of literary allusion, as seen in the epigraph from Arthur Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” for his 2001 MFA thesis: “I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.”19 Rimbaud sounds the keynote for his rebellion against the military-industrial complex in this collection of short stories. The stories dramatize the broad spectrum of tortured inner lives represented in the Marine Corps, from a homosexual recruit to an aging veteran who hungers to return to action.
The critical dimension of Swofford’s writing during this period appears to have been lost on Jarhead screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., who showed little interest in conveying Swofford’s bitter invective. “Our story” as depicted in the film “is apolitical,” according to Broyles. “It’s about young men who join the Marine Corps to find a place for themselves in life.”20 Swofford’s story is instead a complex revelation of the struggle for status among the troops based on killing a hostile enemy, a quest whose intensity is inversely proportionate to their concern for the larger political purpose of the war. The “wreck in your head” in the aftermath of war is the willingness “to go back in time, back to the Desert for the chance to kill. You consider yourself less a Marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat.” This distinction, more than any other form of service by way of saving comrades, surviving a severe wound, or executing a winning strategy or tactical maneuver on the battlefield, “means everything.”21 Swofford’s revelation is that he was a killing machine who did not kill. A commanding officer had opted to call in air strikes rather than allow him his chance at validation as a true Marine. This meant the war for him, as for so many other Marines, was akin to playing the role of the hobos in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot: all preparation, anticipation, and no action. The final words before the curtain, “Yes, let’s Go.” The stage direction: They do not move.22
Privileged Observer
Among the outpouring of critical acclaim for Jarhead that flooded the press after its publication in 2003, one of the most precise insights came from Martin Amis, the writer and son of the world-renowned English novelist and critic Kingsley Amis. Perched atop the world of contemporary literature as one of its most trusted arbiters, Amis steered away from the sort of praise for the book that typically situated it among the classics of war literature, from Homer’s Iliad to The Things They Carried. Instead, he situated the book as a “work of reportage from a ‘privileged’ observer”—his scare quotes indicating an irony that resonates with Swofford’s deeply critical stance toward the Marines. In that nonfiction genre, Swofford displays “genuine talent,” according to Amis.23 Immersive journalism has been a mainstay of Swofford’s writing, a strong suit that has served him far better than his forays into fiction.
Jarhead “deserves its acclaim,” as one reviewer wrote, especially for its capacity to connect personal experience to the broader industrial context, such as troop deployments and the price of oil: “By late September, the American troop count in Saudi reached 150,000 and the price of crude oil has nearly doubled.”24 Such claims combined with detailed testimony about dysfunctional equipment, abuse from commanding officers, and inhumane treatment to prompt the U.S. Marine Corps to issue an official statement, proclaiming, “the movie’s script is an inaccurate portrayal of Marines in general and does not provide a reasonable interpretation of military life.”25 If Jarhead’s politics are any indication, such condemnation from the Marine Corps Office of Public Affairs was a badge of honor to Swofford, whose work was admired for its journalistic cunning.
Exit A, Swofford’s first and only novel that followed Jarhead in 2007, on the other hand, “deserves no acclaim” according to William T. Vollmann, reviewing the book for the New York Times, because “it doesn’t convey life vividly or believably,” and most damningly, it lacks the journalistic yet deeply connected criticism of Jarhead that transcends conventional memoir. Critics registered shock at Swofford’s hollow and clichéd writing in Exit A. Where was the privileged observer, reviewers wondered, and his anthropological angle of vision that could capture and define an entire military culture and the fine gradations of each of its subcultures? As Vollmann diagnosed the problem: “It analyzes nothing. Whatever distinctions and connections it makes remain superficial at best.” Its prose, he argued, “befits a Harlequin romance novel,” rather than functioning, according to its publicity announcements, as “confirmation of Swofford as a major literary talent.”26
Exit A is an attempt to extend and amplify a touching scene in Jarhead depicting Swofford’s tryst with an Okinawa restaurant owner’s daughter named Yumiko. This is Swofford writing relationships and erotica at his best. In the sleepy seaside town of Naha, where the lovers conduct an affair despite her having a local boyfriend, we hear of them snorkeling in “the ocean blue like a welder’s flame” and making love in “her father’s three-cylinder Suzuki van” to aromas of “burnt engine oil and seaweed” and “the slow slap of the ocean on dark volcanic rocks.” On his last night on the island before permanently shipping off the base, Yumiko sneaks into his private barracks. The scene is as painful as it is beautiful, a lyrical aubade lamenting the arrival of dawn. “As the sun broke into the barracks, we wept, and she kissed my chest softly.”27
The unexpected strength of romance writing in the range of skills displayed in Jarhead, however, was lost on some readers. In particular, Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton’s “Gulf War Memoir Syndrome” alleged that Jarhead was falsely canonized. Piedmont-Marton narrowed her sights specifically on the sniper’s Gulf War memoir. Among her most damning comments were that his writing struck her as “MFA-ish and sometimes gratuitously swaggering and crude” with its “derivative and self-involved” narrative voice. This was in direct opposition to critics like Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times and literary gatekeepers like Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down. Piedmont-Marton considered their overblown praise “to participate more in a discourse of desire” for the book’s success “than a discourse of critique.”28 That discourse of desire, academic Jon Robert Adams argues, is tantamount to a larger cultural desire for closure to the Vietnam syndrome, which is known as the malaise of engaging in a series of unwinnable conflicts with no measurable progress. Adams points out that the desire to find literariness where it does not exist in Jarhead places the text “in a literary lineage of great war literature—literature that’s ostensibly written only about great wars.”29 According to this argument, to canonize Swofford is to transform the Persian Gulf War of 1991 into a great war, and therefore one that American culture can understand as a resolution to a worthwhile conflict. But neither the text of Jarhead nor its political impact on the Marine Corps, as evidenced in its public condemnation of the film, bears this out.
The ideological and cultural purposes of Swofford’s canonization n
otwithstanding, there remains a serious question of the unanimous praise that seems to have created a feeding frenzy based on the endorsement of several key gatekeepers to war classics. In particular, Bowden, in a review conspicuously titled “The Things They Carried,” heralded the book as “some kind of classic . . . that will go down with the best books ever written about military life.” The essay’s title, of course, implies that Swofford is the heir to Tim O’Brien while also appropriating Vietnam paradigms for his canonization.30 Kakutani was even more explicit in ranking Jarhead among the greatest war narratives of all time, describing it as “a book that combines the black humor of Catch-22 with the savagery of Full Metal Jacket and the visceral detail of The Things They Carried.”31
What much of this critical discourse in the initial reception of Jarhead reveals is a neglect of the category of privileged observer within the genre of literary journalism. Piedmont-Marton’s accusation of MFA-ish writing breaks down under close scrutiny, especially in light of the unique trio of instructors, Frank Conroy, Chris Offutt, and Joy Williams, who trained Swofford at Iowa. Her objection to his “crude gratuitous swagger,” further, reveals a blindness to its function as a crucial element of Jarhead’s narrative persona, one that reveals Marine attitudes and mores. This almost anthropological level of insight into the culture of military life is potent precisely because of its capability to demonstrate that swaggering bravado—and the vulnerabilities beneath it.
A Delicate Aggression Page 41
