On the surface, Anthony Swofford seemed to be the quintessential "jarhead"; a front-line combat Marine who shouldered 100-pound packs and waded into battle-torn Iraq with little or no hesitation. But, as this harrowing memoir shows, Desert Storm veteran Swofford carried mental baggage far heavier than duffel bags with bed rolls and rifles. Jarhead brandishes the intensity of military life in all its maddening contradictions. By turns, Swofford is presented as terrified, bored, and remorseful; a victim of his own memories and the captain of his own renewal. From boot camp to post-battle doldrums, he struggles through mental minefields and wartime doubts. Unflinching and revelatory (there are frank descriptions of American military behavior during the Kuwaiti campaign that the Pentagon had suppressed), this memoir has become an instant classic.

Swofford's war ends in a strangely appropriate fashion, as he and a colleague are sent out on a mission far from their battalion. The Iraqi army quits, the fighting stops. And no one remembers the men who have been left out in the desert.

That's a story Philip Caputo and James Webb would have understood well. — Chris Bray

Swofford's book is about the man who feels cheated because the Gulf War was over so quickly, and he was, perhaps, both relieved and horrified. "I am not well," he writes, "but I am not mad." He describes what it was like getting ready for the war, and his book, he wants us to know, "is neither true nor false but what I know." He knows an immense amount as a member of the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. In short, he was a scout-sniper and a good one. Although it might be said snipers are often very peculiar people. — Gloria Emerson

In 1990, Swofford, a young Marine sniper, went to Saudi Arabia with dreams of vaporizing Iraqi skulls into clouds of "pink mist." As he recounts in this aggressively uninspiring Gulf War memoir, his youthful bloodlust was never satisfied. After spending months cleaning sand out of his rifle -- so feverish with murderous anticipation that he almost blows a buddy's head off after an argument -- Swofford ends up merely a spectator of a lopsided battle waged with bombs, not bullets. The rage the soldiers feel, their hopes of combat frustrated, is "nearly unendurable." Swofford's attempts at brutal honesty sometimes seem cartoonish: "Rape them all, kill them all" is how he sums up his military ethic. He is better at comic descriptions -- gas masks malfunctioning in the desert heat, camels picked off during target practice -- that capture the stupid side of a smart-bomb war.

A witty, profane, down-in-the-sand account of the war many only know from CNN, this former sniper's debut is a worthy addition to the battlefield memoir genre. There isn't a bit of heroic posturing as Swofford describes the sheer terror of being fired upon by Iraqi troops; the elite special forces warrior freely admits wetting himself once rockets start exploding around his unit's encampment. But the adrenaline of battle is fleeting, and Swofford shows how it's in the waiting that soldiers are really made. With blunt language and bittersweet humor, he vividly recounts the worrying, drinking, joking, lusting and just plain sitting around that his troop endured while wondering if they would ever put their deadly skills to use. As Operation Desert Shield becomes Desert Storm, one of Swofford's fellow snipers-the most macho of the bunch-solicits a hug from each man. "We are about to die in combat, so why not get one last hug, one last bit of physical contact," Swofford writes. "And through the hugs [he] helps make us human again." When they do finally fight, Swofford questions whether the men are as prepared as their commanders, the American public and the men themselves think they are. Swofford deftly uses flashbacks to chart his journey from a wide-eyed adolescent with a family military legacy to a hardened fighter who becomes consumed with doubt about his chosen role. As young soldiers might just find themselves deployed to the deserts of Iraq, this book offers them, as well as the casual reader, an unflinching portrayal of the loneliness and brutality of modern warfare and sophisticated analyses of-and visceral reactions to-its politics. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

In his memoir on life as a U.S. Marine, Swofford starts out by admitting that what he describes "is neither true nor false, but what I know." This is in no sense a chronicle of the Gulf War but instead an interior monolog reflecting Swofford's inner journey from despised childhood to coming of age as an enlisted marine and finally coming somewhat to terms with the man he has become. For Swofford, warfare was the culmination of everything he had experienced, so that his existential narrative hangs on his pivotal nine-month tour of duty. The boredom, frustration, fear, physical exertion, and relentless training all contributed to his sense of self, but in the end he felt capable of backing away from the total absorption of combat to live in the real world. Unfortunately, reconnection with civilian life turned out to be no easier than living in the combat zone. Many libraries may be put off by the book's pervasive sex and profanity, but it is an eloquent depiction of the martial enthusiasm of young men. Recommended for comprehensive military collections.-Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

The descriptions of the 1991 gulf war in Anthony Swofford's harrowing new memoir feel like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting of hell, combined with something out of "Blade Runner": spectral oil well fires burning day and night, as a petrol rain falls on the blasted desert and psy-ops helicopters fly overhead, blasting tapes of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones — music from another war — in an effort to unnerve enemy soldiers. Wearing jungle camouflage gear that makes them "look like mulberry bushes marching through the desert" — because their sand-colored suits haven't arrived — small battalions of American soldiers trek across a wasteland, dotted with the smoking ruins of Iraqi tanks and the rotting corpses of dead Iraqis, blown away by American air power.

At night the marines dig shallow sleep pits in the sand as protection against small arms and artillery, but there is the constant fear of a gas attack. "In my dark fantasies," Mr. Swofford writes, "the chemicals are gassy and green or yellow and floating around the warhead, the warhead on its way to me, my personal warhead, whistling its way to the earth, into my little hole."

By turns profane and lyrical, swaggering and ruminative, "Jarhead" — referring to the marines' "high-and-tight" haircuts, which make their heads look like jars — is not only the most powerful memoir to emerge thus far from the last gulf war, but also a searing contribution to the literature of combat, 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."

Mr. Swofford, who served in a United States Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the operation known as Desert Storm, drinks, carries on and trash-talks with the rowdiest of his comrades. But he is also the one who reads the "Iliad," "The Stranger" and "Hamlet" in his spare time, and he has found in his own book a narrative voice that accommodates both parts of his temperament: an irreverent but meditative voice that captures both the juiced-up machismo of jarhead culture and the existential loneliness of combat. He can be unsparingly candid about the ugly emotions released by war — one of his platoon mates brutally desecrates Iraqi corpses — and Mr. Swofford admits to feeling blood lust, afraid he won't get a kill before war ends. But he is also eloquent about the terrible physical and psychological costs of combat and the emotional bonds shared by soldiers.

He makes us understand the exacting and deadly art practiced by a sniper, going after the "pink mist" of a kill or making a "dime group at a grand," that is, three shots that can be covered by a dime, on a target 1,000 yards away. He makes us feel the rhythm of boredom and terror of preparing for an enemy attack and the sheer physical ordeal of humping 100 pounds of gear 20 miles in the desert heat. He tells us how he contemplated committing suicide in the days before the war and how his roommate Troy talked him out of pulling the trigger, and he tells us how he survived the actual war only to come close to dying when he casually walked into an empty but booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.

Like so many war memoirs and novels, "Jarhead" takes the form of a bildungsroman: it traces the familiar real-life sequence of initiation, from boot camp to shipping out to combat, while chronicling the author's passage from innocence to disillusion. Instead of writing a strictly chronological account, however, Mr. Swofford uses flashbacks and flashforwards to tell his story, an effective strategy in this case, as it juxtaposes his youthful idealism with adult cynicism and despair, gung-ho bravado with doubts and fears and crumbling religious faith.

We learn that Mr. Swofford's father served in Vietnam, his grandfather in World War II, and that despite the postwar trauma sustained by his father, the author understood from a very early age "that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer be just a son, I needed someday to fight."

Though his parents refused to give him permission to join the Marines at 17 — by way of encouragement, the recruiter told them that their son would "be a great killer" — he joined several months later, when he was able to sign the contract on his own. In part, he says in retrospect, he joined the corps to compete with his brother, Jeff, who had joined the Army; in part "to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home" in the wake of his parents' collapsing marriage.

Mr. Swofford's account of boot camp and the long wait in Saudi Arabia for the war to begin is rich in the absurdities of military bureaucracy: one colonel, seeing that reporters are on hand, insists that the platoon play football for an hour, wearing gas masks and protective suits (which raise the body temperature to 130 degrees). Not surprisingly the author and many of his fellow recruits quickly develop a cynical humor. Their loyalty is to one another and to privately held ideals of honor and valor, not to the mission to which they've been assigned.

"We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion," he writes, "and while we laugh at our jokes and we all think we're damn funny jarheads, we know we might soon die, and this is not funny, the possibility of death, but like many combatants before us we laugh to obscure the tragedy of our cheap, squandered lives."

In the course of "Jarhead" Mr. Swofford conveys a chilling sense of what it is like to be under enemy fire, and he also communicates a palpable sense of the fog of war: the chaos of fighting in a desert landscape offering little cover, where the hazards of friendly fire are nearly as great as the danger of being hit by the enemy, where months of training and discipline can be undone in a second by malfunctioning equipment or a fellow soldier's momentary inattention.

Although the reader wishes that the portraits of some of the author's comrades in arms had been more fully fleshed out, that some of the asides about unfaithful girlfriends and obnoxious acquaintances had been trimmed back, Mr. Swofford writes with such ardor and precision that these lapses are quickly forgotten.

With "Jarhead," he has written the literary equivalent of a dime group at a grand.

War is hell. And maybe just a little fun, once some of the shock has worn off. So this literate and nuanced if sometimes self-conscious coming-of-age tale instructs. Swofford's debut covers all the bases: a stint in basic training with a brutal drill instructor, drunken episodes with prostitutes, fights with sailors, explosions and their attendant airborne body parts, postwar trauma and depression. Yet there's not a clichéd moment in this rueful account of a Marine's life, in which the hazards are many and the rewards few. Swofford, for instance, recounts a bout with one of those hazards, dysentery, earned by consuming a stolen vat of salad greens while awaiting orders to attack the opposing Iraqi line along the Saudi border: "The lettuce came from Jordanian fields where they use human feces as fertilizer. So here we are, defending a country none of us gives a shit about, eating its neighbors' shit, and burying ours in the sand." Another hazard, we learn, is the presence of battle-deranged fellow squad members, one of whom takes to systematically disfiguring a fallen Iraqi fighter: "He says the look on the dead man's face, his mocking gesture, is insulting, and that the man deserved to die, and now that he's dead the man's corpse deserves to be fucked with." Still another hazard, quite apart from dangerous food and dangerous psychopaths, is the endless politicking of the brass, one of whom keeps Swofford, a sniper, from assassinating an Iraqi officer and perhaps inducing that officer's charges to surrender rather than fight on. And so on. For all the dangers, the author allows, a certain exhilaration attends the facing of a deadly enemy and living to tell the tale, a joy that no civiliancan possibly understand-though Swofford does his best to explain. Extraordinary: full of insight into the minds and rucksacks of our latter-day warriors.

"Jarhead will go down with the best books ever written about military life." —Mark Bowden Author of Black Hawk Down

"A searing contribution to the literature of combat, 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....An irreverent but meditative voice that captures the juiced-up machismo of jarhead culture and the existential loneliness of combat...Mr. Swofford conveys a chilling sense of what it is like to be under enemy fire, and he also communicates a palpable sense of the fog of war." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A bayonet in the eye...brutal and unforgettable." —The Sacramento Bee

"A brutally honest memoir...gut-wrenching frontline reportage." —Entertainment Weekly

"Extraordinary: full of insight into the minds and rucksacks of our latter-day warriors." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Swofford was a Marine sniper during the Gulf War of 1991. However, that conflict takes up only a small part of this memoir. Most of this stream-of-consciousness recollection is the author telling us of his life as a military brat, his youth, and his experiences in the Corps before the events of 1991. Swofford’s world is one of brutality and sex and things that seem more than they are. Swofford reads his own work in an understated, somewhat monotonous voice. He is deadpan but has much intensity. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine