Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: The war in your mind

By John Ziebell

"Our rucks are heavy with equipment and ammunition," Anthony Swofford says at one point in Jarhead, his recently published memoir, "but even heavier with the burdens of history, and each step we take, the burdens increase."

Swofford is talking about the last Gulf War, which gives the passage a certain resonance in light of current events. History, remember, is that study which is supposed to help us avoid repeating painful mistakes. Swofford was the real article in that conflict, a Marine Corps scout/sniper, here to remind us that the video games seen on CNN weren't always representative. Among other things.

"I saw more of the war than the average grunt. Still, my vision was blurred--by wind and sand and distance, by false signals, poor communication and bad coordinates, by stupidity and fear and ignorance, by valor and false pride. By the mirage."

Mirages are, by their nature, illusory, definable only in their defect. No matter what the White House chooses to title a war, it's still hell, we all know--at least in the abstract. We get a sense of that from Hollywood, from movies, which are themselves mirages. Still, art--movies and books anyway--performs some service in attempting to discuss what the media won't. Currently, wars are more closely managed than professional wrestling and the public doesn't get much primary source material. CNN and NPR offer nearly identical glosses on canned "briefings"; one just seasons the prevarication with visuals of cool hardware, such as tanks and jets.

Like good authors before him, Swofford spends a lot of time sorting out the layers of obfuscation that surround anything martial. Like his precursors, Swofford is stymied in part by the inability of reality, no matter how gritty, to overpower myth. And there's a lot of myth to deal with here, from the brotherhood of arms through "good" wars to the oblique policy statements of the rich Texans--same Texans, different war--who sent the "United States Oil Corps" to unabashedly secure a healthy percentage of the world's tapped resources. And the mythical USMC itself, of course. Because being a jarhead isn't a job, or an adventure; it's a lifestyle, one that its members may love or hate or both but are nonetheless committed to at a level beyond reason.

It's this dilemma, the conflict between substance and perception, that drives Swofford's writing. The book is about the Gulf War, but while those segments are the most compelling and well-written, the "other battles" are awarded greater space. Which is fair. When you're downrange, on the receiving end, the difference between being engaged by Iraqi rockets or the friendly fire of American tanks is philosophically significant, but only for those who live to reflect upon it. The war stories are narrative gems, but whether real or surreal, they're pretty much preaching to one choir or another, how the author balances the rest of his existence around them is a far more demanding task.

There's a lot of standard-issue fare in the book--fighting and whoring and drinking and pondering the love/hate relationship all jarheads have with their institution--but what gives Swofford's prose its rare and brutal elegance is his refusal to prettify his own edgy persona for public consumption. He knows asshole behavior when he sees it, but that doesn't stop him from stepping up. The mere contemplation of suicide, from this perspective, becomes an engaged and participatory endeavor: "When you have the muzzle of a high-powered rifle in your mouth, there are many things to consider other than your despair."

The most stubborn of myths is the one that features war as a test, a form of measurement. But it's not possible, perhaps unfortunately, to face the population of the everyday world from a fighting hole. No matter how uneasy his relationship with the Marine Corps, at war or peace, Swofford views his alternative and its cast--unfaithful lovers, unbalanced friends, domineering and divorced father, institutionalized sister, brother dead of cancer--as somehow more important in the end, more valuable, but at the same time schizophrenic enough for him to address in the second person:

"It took years for you to understand that the most complex and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operations, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head."