CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK: Memoirs show war's paradoxes

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Memoirs show war's paradoxes

'Jarhead' captures complex truths

By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff, 3/19/2003

One could make the case that the war memoir is the oldest genre in Western literature; also that, as a deterrent to the thing itself, it has had negligible effect. If three millennia ago Homer sang of the futility of Achilles' rage, ''hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,'' he also recognized the horrible allure of violence -- knew that the drive for blood and vengeance was a fundamental tragedy of the human condition. But to view ''The Iliad'' as a glorification of war (as does some modern scholarship) is to miss the point, or at least take aim at the messenger. What the epic poet glimpsed was one of the darkest and most essential truths about civilization, even if he did pass the buck in his second stanza, where he asked, ''What god drove them to fight with such a fury?''

Modernity, of course, has tended to rephrase that question, placing the blame on generals and imperialists who seem too often ready to send innocent sons to slaughter. Less frequently acknowledged, and less bearable, is the reality of blood lust -- the most primitive urge toward physical supremacy -- and its exploitation by the modern nation-state. The best war memoirs confront this sorrowful fact without exalting it, conceding that the cost of such aggression -- call it the spoils of the living -- can be an incalculable despair.

Anthony Swofford, who served as lance corporal in a scout/sniper platoon during the Gulf War, acknowledges that payback head-on in ''Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles'' (Scribner), as unadorned in its candor as it is searing in its detail.

The book opens with a scene at a base in California in 1990, when Swofford's platoon -- he was in the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines -- was put on standby for what would become Operation Desert Storm. The men made a run for all the beer and war movies they could carry, then spent the next three days waiting for orders, yelling ''Semper fi!'' at one another, and cheering over the battle scenes in ''Apocalypse Now'' and ''Full Metal Jacket.'' ''Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man,'' writes Swofford. ''It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar -- the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.'' Locked and loaded, indeed. ''Jarhead'' (the title is slang for a Marine because of his high-and-tight haircut) is a chilling narrative, and it comes across with the sweat-and-carbine realism of a documentary film. Swofford's fondness for the men with whom he served doesn't diminish his scorn for half his superiors or for the alleged reasons they were deployed to Saudi Arabia. (''We are soldiers for the vast fortunes of others,'' he writes.) Nor did his roll-with-the-punches affability prevent a couple of hair-raising incidents with his M16 -- once while pondering his own suicide, then when he brutalized a fellow Marine who had gone to sleep during watch. Swofford eventually pulled his punches on both those occasions, but he rarely does so in ''Jarhead,'' which is remarkably free of self-serving cant, recrimination, or regret.

The son of a Vietnam veteran who tried to dissuade him from enlisting, Swofford was 20 when he went to Saudi Arabia; he was the company scribe in boot camp and during slow times could be found reading ''Hamlet'' or ''The Myth of Sisyphus.'' An existentialist with a rifle, he had a raw instinct for the rules of survival: Never hesitate, never humanize the enemy, never celebrate the war for its own sake. He delivers the surrealism of those months in the desert (propagandistic ''soft'' bombs, with their happy-ending leaflets, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones pouring from psy-ops helicopters) as well as the war's quotidian horrors: the anti-nerve gas pills taken by the handful, the bleeding crotches from 20-mile treks, sand in every orifice and every meal. And because this is a war story, its emotional compass can swing from humanity to the lack of it in an instant. A description of an oddly dignified tableau of Iraqi corpses, frozen where they sat around a campfire, is followed by a scene of Marines firing dead Iraqi soldiers' AK47s in a frenzy of rage and elation.

One of the most powerful aspects of Swofford's chronicle is his grasp of the intimacy between a soldier and his weapon -- or, more particularly, between a sniper and his rifle (which, in the case of the Barrett .50-caliber, has a range of 2,000 yards). Approaching the one-shot-one-kill tenet of a sniper takes an infinity of patience and precision. There are no acceptable near misses. If you fail, ''you have missed the target but the target hasn't missed you,'' writes Swofford. ''Your enemy will be the last person to witness you as a living thing.''

''Jarhead'' is not always as artful as it wants to be; in fact, its weakest moments are when Swofford tries to wax literary, relying on excessive or weak metaphor when the bald truth is plenty bracing enough. But it unflinchingly succeeds in a mission on which no general would have ever sent his best man: It delivers a terrible secret about war, its sexiness and its bombs-and-rockets glory, along with the bill paid for that thrill on the other side. It brings home the kill, in other words, and we have to stand there and watch.

Swofford was one of the half-million or more troops who served in the Gulf War, many of whom are now as displaced and forgotten as their Vietnam predecessors. We tend to prefer the winners for our photo ops, the young men and women smiling through their tears as they salute and head for Kuwait. So the Vietnam vet who, drunk and disheveled, approached one of Swofford's company on their return emerges here as a cruel reminder of how short our memories can be in wartime: ''Thank you, thank you, jarheads,'' he said, ''for making them see we are not bad animals.''

Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist for the Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, has spent much of his career trying to prove that point. His second book on the psychological casualties of war, ''Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming'' (Scribner), is a scholarly work that picks up the trail where the war stories end -- or where their legacies are just beginning. ''You consider yourself less of a Marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat,'' writes Swofford, defining, with the universality of that second-person voice, what must be Shay's life task. ''There is a wreck in your head, part of the aftermath, and you must dismantle the wreck.''

So the war stories record the triumphs and the losses and the broken minds, and we will tell them and listen as long as there are soldiers to return. ''I went to cover the war and the war covered me,'' wrote Michael Herr in ''Dispatches,'' ''an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.'' Herr's Vietnam memoir was seminal in part because he dared to address the voyeuristic charge of war and its purple-haze glamour.

But it seems our rough duty as a people to remember this truth and paradox: that it's possible to love war and hate it in the same split second, and that a lot of us do. The price of that affection is just as Homer called it 3,000 years ago, when ''the earth ran black with blood.'' And will again.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.