A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, First Published in 2003

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Jakub Hamari

Jarhead: a Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and other Battles A Narrative Analysis of the Novel Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr.

2013

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

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ACKOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. Tomáš Pospíšil, for all his support and help.

I would also like to thank my friend Jan Zbořil, who has been a great supporter during all phases of my work.

Many thanks belong to my family, without whose support I would never even get to write this thesis in the first place. Especially to my sister, who has offered me many useful insights on the topic.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction ...... 5 2. Author’s biography ...... 7 3. Swofford’s applied literary techniques ...... 9 4. Main Characters ...... 12 4.1 Swofford ...... 12 4.2 Troy ...... 12 4.3 Mr. Swofford ...... 13 5. Analysis of the Novel ...... 15 5.1 Significance of the opening scene ...... 15 5.2 Three moments shifting the perspective ...... 16 5.2.1 Deciding for the Marines for the first time ...... 16 5.2.2 Thinking about suicide ...... 17 5.2.3 Swofford’s retrospective analysis ...... 19 5.3 Joining the Marine Corps ...... 20 5.4 The Nature of Swofford’s War ...... 23 5.4.1 About Football and Field Fuck ...... 26 5.4.2 Writing Home and Sexual Frustration ...... 29 5.4.3 The Pain of (not) Killing ...... 35 5.4.4 The Anti-anti-war Movies ...... 40 5.4.5 Religion in the USMC ...... 42 5.4.6 The War’s End ...... 43 5.5 Looking back ...... 44 6. Conclusion ...... 46 Résumé in English ...... 51 Resumé v češtině ...... 51

1. INTRODUCTION War has been a topic for writers since time immemorial. Throughout the centuries, stories about war and the people who waged it were told, discussed and interpreted. The twentieth century has provided amplitude of conflicts and vast amount of war narratives, which have now become classics. The first decade of the twenty first century has been marked by two major conflicts which saw the involvement of United

States Marine Corps. This is the fighting force in which Anthony Swofford participated as a scout/sniper during the first Gulf War dubbed Operation Desert Strom, but the marines called it simply The Desert. His narrative Jarhead: a Marine's chronicle of the

Gulf War and other battles has since its first release in 2003 become a cult novel among the military personnel and highly praised war narrative among the critics (Rieckhoff,

2006; Author’s Website). The success of his debut novel was so massive, that Swofford could not handle it and wasted most of it on drugs, sex and sports cars, in which he had a near-fatal accident (The Book Show #1246). Swofford himself believes, that his time in the Marine Corps is to blame for that more than the excess of money and fame following the book’s success (The Book Show #1246).

In my thesis, I discuss Anthony Swofford’s novel Jarhead in the form of the original text. The novel, first published in 2003, offers the reader a very personal insight on the thoughts and actions of Anthony Swofford during his adolescence and his stay in the military.

The work itself is divided into four main chapters, with the last one being divided into multiple subchapters and I sum up the work with a conclusion.

The first chapter provides Anthony Swofford’s background as a serviceman in the USMC, but also his family relationships, which are fundamental for understanding the novel itself, because of its autobiographical features.

The second chapter provides an insight on the literary techniques, which

Swofford uses in his novel. To point out some of these- unreliable narration based on the terms proposed by Fludernik and, in popular war narratives, not so frequently found method of establishing intimacy between the audience and the narrator by showing the main character’s/author’s flaws.

The third chapter of my thesis focuses on the three characters, who I found as the most important in the plot twists of the novel. These characters are Anthony

Swofford himself, a fellow scout/sniper Troy and Swofford’s father, who I dubbed Mr.

Swofford, since his name is never given. This chapter helps the reader understand the drive of the characters right from the beginning, so it makes navigation through the plot simpler.

The fourth and final chapter is pivotal for my thesis, because in it I analyze the text Jarhead as a whole. I applied multiple subchapters into this chapter to analyze certain aspects of the novel more thoroughly. The aim of the subchapters is to analyze factors like cultural clash, Swofford’s relationship with women or his thoughts on taking lives. Especially, I stress out the importance of the transition, which takes part on three occasions. These occasions change Swofford from being a child, who is adamant on becoming a marine and finally transforming the man into the author of Jarhead.

Swofford himself mentions war movies as a great factor in his military life and thus I also explore the connections between the so-called anti-war movies and the effects they have on the narrator. This I achieve through the application of some thoughts produced by Jeffrey Gross, Garrett Stewart and others. The text is carefully analyzed to prove that Swofford’s narrative technique and the elaborate events of the novel make it an unsurpassable enterprise in the war narrative genre of the last decade.

2. AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Anthony Swofford was born in 1970 in California. His family had strong ties to the military. His grandfather went fighting in the WWII, his father served in Vietnam, his uncle died during his service in the marines and his brother was enlisted in the army and stationed in Germany, during Swofford’s time in the Gulf War. Due to his father’s work in the Air Force, Swofford’s family lived most of his childhood on military bases.

Anthony decided to join the military as early as possible, because he saw it as an introduction to becoming a man and also he was afraid that he would become homeless.

He joined the United States Marine Corp at the age of 17, more accurately, half a year after his 17th birthday, the minimal acceptable age for the recruit. He could have joined at 17 but his parents would have to sign him up and they did not want another son joining the military, so he waited another six months and signed himself.

After his military career Anthony Swofford found hard adapting to civilian life and after trying a variety of jobs he decided to deepen his education. He received education at American River College, the University of California; Davis and the

University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he received the Master of Fine Arts degree. He then worked as a teacher at University of Iowa and Lewis, at St. Mary's

College of California and also at Clark College. Anthony Swofford is a Michener-

Copernicus Fellowship recipient (Jarhead, Author’s Website).

After Jarhead he wrote a novel Exit A, a work of fiction, which still maintains some autobiographic features and after that he wrote a completely autobiographic piece

Hotels, Hospitals and Jails depicting years following the events of Jarhead. Aside from his literary achievements, he also contributed to the documentary Operation

Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which focuses on Afghanistan and Iraq experience of soldiers, marines and air men as they themselves have written it down.

3. SWOFFORD’S APPLIED LITERARY TECHNIQUES The plot of the novel, told by the first person narrator, is never cohesive and keeps transiting from one period of time to another one, related to each other only by the presence of the narrator. The first person narrator is a homodiegetic narrator, mainly because the other characters appearing in the story are depicted only by how their actions appear in the narrator’s view (Fonioková 70) and the narrator’s view is 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.” (Swofford, 2).

His unreliability as a narrator is based on his inability to provide accurate information, he is ideologically unreliable and there is lack of objectivity of his claims.

These are three aspects that for Fludernik provide the basis of an unreliable narrator (qtd. in Fonioková, 67). Fludernik proclaims that “for unreliability to be present in the text, there needs to exist a secret, a figure in the carpet, that the reader has to uncover behind

(and against) the narrator’s discourse” (qtd. in Fonioková 50). This not the case of

Jarhead, there is no secret character present, there is only the narrator and his complaints, which he gives to the audience.

The narrator proves his unreliability in the very beginning stating: “[…] what follows is neither true nor false but what I know.” (Swofford, 2). Swofford also adds that he must have consulted maps, charts, weapon capabilities etc. to provide accurate details about things that he has forgotten. He continues his narrative unconvincingly with a try to remember the faces and names of his platoon mates, their girlfriends and wives, who stayed faithful and who did not.

Swofford clearly declares what he remembers or he does not, he is honest to his audience, in an interview he stated that “I could have written a flattering portrait of myself as a young Marine, but it would have been a much lesser book.” (Anderson).

This is an interesting method, because the popular culture, throughout time, tends to show the soldier as the bearer of the best (preferably American) values, as seen in many more or less successful war movies like The Green Berets (Kellogg; Wayne, 1968), Red

Dawn (Milius, 1984), Top Gun (Scott, 1986), Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) or

Pearl Harbor (Bay, 2001).

Even though Swofford at first undermines the reader’s faith in the accuracy of his claims, he establishes a sense of intimacy between himself and the reader with lines such as “[I remember] lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me.” (Swofford, 3). The reader must always keep in mind, already mentioned Swofford’s words: “[…] what follows is neither true nor false but what I know.” (Swofford, 2), the memoire is not going to provide accurate information about battles, unit movement or equipment, it is a deeply personal account of what the United States Marine Corps (USMC) does not put into their brochures.

The perception of time and its recollection is of great importance in the whole novel. Since Swofford tries to be as accurate as he can be, he uses precise dates for things occurring during his time in the Desert. The dates he uses are taken from official documents (Swofford, 2). There is a conflict between the precision of the dates during the war and the vagueness of time, when he recalls his childhood or adolescence. There is no documentary for his childhood or growing up he can find in the Federal

Depository Library, where he finds documents about the war (Swofford, 2). His childhood and adolescence can be recalled only through strong emotional voyages into

his memory. His precise dating of the events in the military is a resonance of the military itself in him, the hard precise man, who is trying hard to cope with life. But when he was a child he was not yet so hard or precise and thus his memories are more tender and mellow, than the ones of him being a jarhead.

4. MAIN CHARACTERS It is important to provide some detail on the main characters that appear in the narrative. For the purposes of my thesis I have narrowed the amount of characters analyzed to three- Swofford, Troy and Swofford’s father, known only as Mr. Swofford.

4.1 SWOFFORD Throughout the book Swofford never gives the impression of being arrogant. He is aware of his superior killing skills over the average infantry man, which would be a source of great pride for the most marines, but he never praises himself for being smarter or sexier or in any way a better man than anybody else.

He states that “Like most good and great marines, I hated the Corps.” (Swofford,

33). This statement presumes that a sign of being a good and a great marine must be that a person hates the USMC. Why he hates the Corps is that it takes away the possibility of being something else than a marine. A person can be a good marine or a bad marine

(whose traits are not specified in Swofford’s narrative). There are only these two absolutes and anything else is just not possible. This boxing in and cancelling of possibilities frustrates the young man, as he wants to have dozens of opportunities in life. Opportunities for being “smart, famous, sexy, oversexed, drunk, fucked, high, alone […] known, understood, loved, forgiven […]” (Swofford, 33). A great motivation for Swofford, during his time in the USMC, is the only one trait a person must have to be a true marine and that is to kill “You consider yourself less of a marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat.” (Swofford, 247).

4.2 TROY Troy is an important character in Swofford’s narrative for many reasons, one of them being a scene, where he interrupts Swofford’s suicide attempt. But what makes

him truly important is the fact that he is mentioned by Swofford even outside the USMC and after their involvement in the war. It is his death and his subsequent funeral, where

Swofford mentions him. The sense of lost is massive for Swofford, when he learns that

Troy died. Their comradeship was the cliché brothers in arms one. Something Philip

Caputo describes as being “unlike marriage, a bond that cannot be broken by a word, by boredom, or divorce, or by anything other than death.” (Caputo, A Rumor of War, 18) and even death seems unable to break this bond. Troy earns much of his respect in memoriam when Swofford learns that Troy minimized his part in his war stories and gave most of the credit to his comrades (Swofford, 79), thus confirming what Broyles states “Every good story is, in at least some of its crucial elements, false.” (Broyles,

1984) and these stories, what Troy made up are the best ones for every audience, be it

Swofford, other marines or Troy’s friends in Michigan. The reason why Troy becomes a major storyteller is that his stories resonate through his audience years after they have been told and they even surpass their author’s death.

4.3 MR. SWOFFORD Swofford’s childhood, as depicted in the book, is always set in a military frame.

This frame is mostly provided by his father, who was an Air Force officer during the

Vietnam War. His father’s experience in the war left him disturbed. What made the relationship with his father even worse was that his father was a perpetual liar, as

Swofford states in an interview and that his biggest lie ever was that “he deceived himself about how that little war in Southeast Asia had changed him.” (Monroy,

Writing What Haunts Us). However Swofford stresses out that his father was never the stereotypical grunt depicted in the movies, due to his age, family ties and proclivities towards Scotch and beer.

“He was not crazed, fucked-in-the-head grunt, stoned on uppers

and nodding on H, not stealthy Special Forces guru, nineteen or twenty,

the perfect age to die, he was a father and a lifer, and while he wasn’t

necessarily a patriot, he wouldn’t be fragging anyone over orders he

didn’t groove on or dig- he’d build the fucking landing strip in the middle

of the gookthick jungle and at the end of the day hope for Chivas and a

Budweiser, write a few letters home, maybe screw a whore in the ville.”

(Swofford, 39)

His father’s post traumatic stress disorder manifested itself in him not being able to stand in one place for too long, migraines, uncontrollable clutching of fists and avoiding social events.

“His doctors weren’t able to explain these ailments […] Of course

he needed help. […] My father was thirty-nine years old and the world

seemed a dead, cold place, void of promises. The problems of his psyche

had become manifest in this hands.” (Swofford, 41)

Swofford himself is a product, a manifestation, of the Vietnam War, he was conceived during his father’s leave on Honolulu and thus he will always make his father remember his war experience. “In bed, in Hawaii, my parents are fornicating. I cannot watch, and neither can you.” (Swofford, 40).

5. ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL

5.1 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE OPENING SCENE The first chapter sets the tone and frame for the novel. It opens with, now former marine, Anthony Swofford in his basement, almost nine years after his discharge “the movie cliché, mad old warrior going through his memorabilia, juicing up before he runs off and kills a few with precision fire.” (Swofford, 1). This scene is important because the audience gets to know that Swofford is no longer tied to the military in an official way and all his unofficial ties are hidden in his rucksack in the basement.

This scene resembles an investigation of a burial site and exhumation of a corpse, the forensic expert, Swofford, is “[…] not mad. I am not well, but I am not mad. I’m after something. Memory, yes.” (Swofford, 1) and the corpse is, as the quote suggests, a memory of his former life. The author is undergoing a radical change of thinking, which

I will analyze in greater depth in the following subchapter.

In this chapter Swofford states that he is not well now, but clearly he also was not well then, in the USMC, and certainly he was not well in the Desert.

“I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit;

mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion;

discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and

drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the

self; lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me.” (Swofford, 3)

This passage states what kind of narration can the reader expect trough the whole novel and presume that it will be frantic, gloomy and most of all deeply personal.

5.2 THREE MOMENTS SHIFTING THE PERSPECTIVE In the novel, there are three major scenes concerning Swofford’s growing-up.

All three are brought up by severely disturbing experiences and the narration is thus blurred and warped by Swofford’s state of mind at that time.

5.2.1 DECIDING FOR THE MARINES FOR THE FIRST TIME The first occasion that changed the course of Swofford’s life was him witnessing the bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241, mostly marines, by then he was fourteen (Swofford, 127). This time he felt the death of others and he wanted to reciprocate for what those 241 dead have given up for him. “At the ripe age of fourteen I’d decided my destiny. I would war and fight and make good for those dead boys dead in Lebanon […]” (Swofford, 131).

He, for the first time, grasped something what he calls manhood

“[The marines] were men and I was a boy falling in love with

manhood. I understood that manhood had to do with war, and war with

manhood and to no longer be just a son, I needed someday to fight.”

(Swofford, 128)

The transition into manhood according to Jeffords is “a set of images, values, interests, and activities held important to a successful achievement of male adulthood in

American cultures.” (Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America, xxii) and for

Swofford these images, values and so on, were deeply connected to the imagery provided by the USMC. Jeffords’ main argument is the masculinity and it is deeply entrenched in the American culture as such. Swofford’s naïve visions of manhood confirm her theory.

Swofford also states that from that moment, when he decided to become a marine, he did not care much about anything else then joining the Corps. His social life was shattered “[other kids] thought I was crazy and that with my camouflage hat and talk of war and retribution I might kill someone or myself.” (Swofford, 128)

But this mattered little to adolescent Swofford since he describes himself as a loner.

“I kept most of my life to myself, not willing to share what would

be ridiculed and tainted by the kids smarter and hipper and better dressed,

the better athletes, the better students, the kids who’d fuck already, the

punk rocker and metalheads and all of them- any of the groups to which I

could never belong.” (Swofford, 131)

5.2.2 THINKING ABOUT SUICIDE The second occasion, where Swofford swaps time and place and tries to grasp the past events takes place during his stay in the rear-rear1. Swofford for the first time mentions his older sister, who is constantly threatening to end her life, so she has to be locked up in a mental hospital. The sanity of the narrator is also in question as he has doubts about the place located outside of the soon-to-be combat zone and he rather be in the field than in this “abandoned oil company camp” he believes to, in fact, be

“[…] a military base that had sat vacant for years, waiting for the

American protectors to arrive in the event of regional conflict, protectors

who’d be tolerated until they obliterated the threat and returned the

region’s massive oil reserves to their proper owners.” (Swofford, 63)

1 A safe zone located behind the warfront

In this place Swofford feels strong anxiety but his “[…] platoon mates urge me to please shut up about the place being rigged, about the Saudis wanting us to die for their oil […]” (Swofford, 65) so he decides to step down from his argument. A fellow

Marine is down at sick call, being on a “suicide watch” after witnessing his wife’s infidelity on a videocassette, she sent him. The term “suicide watch” makes Swofford think about his sister and the visits he and the mother gave her in institutions for suicidal patients. The suicide stays a strong topic for Swofford even after the events of

Jarhead as he participates in the Hero Project with his contribution on new wave of suicides in the military (Swofford, Newsweek, Vol. 159, No. 22).

Swofford’s sister attempted suicide more than once and she spends most of her life in these institutions, as Swofford foreshadows. After contemplating about his girlfriend’s possible infidelity, which he sees as certainty, Swofford puts the muzzle of his rifle into his mouth.

“But Kristina’s various infidelities are not the reasons […] The

reasons are hard to name. […] To move closer toward my sister?

Cowardice? Fatigue? Boredom? Curiosity? It’s not the suicide’s job to

know, but only to do.” (Swofford, 70)

His squad mate Troy walks in just in time to stop him. Swofford later contemplates about himself not yet having reached the point, where he could commit suicide with a clear mind. He directly links the act of taking one’s own life as an act of courage and that he lacks the courage.

“[…] I think suicide is rather courageous. To look at one’s life

and decide that it’s not worth living, then to go through with the horrible

act […] there is the courageous man and woman, the suicide. But I don’t

own the courage to kill myself.” (Swofford, 74)

5.2.3 SWOFFORD’S RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS The last one, going deep into his childhood on an American Air Force base in

Japan, is started after the humiliating football game in full MOPP suits2 during intense heat of the Desert. Combined with food poisoning, Swofford and other squad members were not yet aware of, led to a loss of consciousness and most certainly death if they were not taken care of (Swofford, 24).

Shortly after the football game, Swofford states that he must sit down and as his senses fail, the narration jumps from the Desert to his memories from Japan. He, as a child, wants to buy candy for his sister’s birthday and stranded roams the streets of

Tachikawa, until he wanders into a tattoo shop, where a couple is getting a portrait tattoo of each other done (Swofford, 23). When the tattoo artist notices him he throws a cigarette at him, the child Swofford picks it up, throws it back and runs out of the shop.

The woman starts screaming. “I didn’t stop running until I made it home.” (Swofford,

24)

This scene serves as a template for Swofford’s state of mind during the whole of the novel. He goes someplace with a good intention, observes and tries to understand acts that are incomprehensible for him at that moment, so he can analyze them after many years.

After the evidence I have provided there can be little doubt that this is a product of mere exaggeration or a literary tool for building up the existential features of the

2 Mission Oriented Protective Posture, suit protecting its wearer against biochemical weapons

book. Swofford provides these three occasions to underline his personality and that his narration will be fractured, grim and not cohesive, due to his experiences during his childhood and growing up.

5.3 JOINING THE MARINE CORPS Swofford, apart from a means for manning up, sees the USMC as a way of escaping a gruesome life of the homeless, because during Reagan’s administration the homeless situation became a major topic for the media and thus it was affecting then adolescent Swofford. He therefore feels lucky to have a home in the Corps.

“I’d always worried about losing my home and running out of

everything […] As a teenager I often suffered anxious daydreams of

becoming homeless, out of a job, unskilled and unloved. […] I joined

the Marine Corps in part to impose domestic structure upon my life, to

find a home […]” (Swofford, 145)

The reason why he chose the Marine Corps over other branches of the American military is fairly simple, he did it to spite his father, who was an airman, wings, as they are called by the legs, which is how the airmen denounce the marines. (The Book Show

#1246).

Swofford entered the United States Marine Corps at the age of 17 and a half.

The reason why I stress these six months is that the recruit can join at age 17, which

Swofford wanted, but only under the condition that their parents (or other legal representatives) have signed the contract in acknowledgement of this (Swofford, 204).

That does not happen in Swofford’s case. The reason is quite simple- the parents did not agree with their son joining the military at such a young age. The reason mother gave is follows 20

“[…] You should go to college before you decide to run off in the

military. I missed college because I married your father, and the next fall

when I should’ve been at the university, I was in Seville. Spain was nice,

but college would’ve been better. You don’t want to run away to dirty

foreign countries. Every marine we ever met complained about the

Marine Corps. They get paid less than anyone else and the food is

supposed to be the worst.” She looked away from me.”And the women

near the bases have diseases. […]” (Swofford, 130)

Mrs. Swofford feels, like most mothers, what her son is like better that the son himself. It is not just protection from poor social status the marines hold or the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, which make the USMC unfavorable. She knows her son is a gentle and intelligent person (Swofford, 248) and she is certain that, eventually, he would voluntarily, after a bitter struggle for happiness, leave the Corps, which indeed does happen. Another marine commented on this in his open letter to Defense department: “What concerns me […] is that among my peers, the ones with ideas are the ones getting out, because they just don't feel the organization values them.“ (Anonymous, A Marine officer: I’m leaving the Corps because it doesn’t much value ideas, 2011).

Swofford’s father’s reasons were much different, less practical than his mother’s, but the intension was the same- not getting their son killed. He had personal experience of the military, his brother died while in the marines and their father, Anthony’s grandfather, served in the Air Force during the WWII, so what he had to say to this matter was deeply rooted in him. On the day Anthony brought the Staff Sergeant home to convince his parents, the father proposed this

“Staff Sergeant, I’ll sign your contract if you guarantee me you

won’t get my son killed. Then I’ll sign your contract […]” The recruiter

said, “I’m sorry, sir. I cannot tell you that. I can tell you Tony will be a

great marine. That he’ll be a part of the finest fighting force on earth and

he’ll fight proudly all enemies of the United States, just as you did once.

He will be a great killer.” (Swofford, 206)

Needless to say, the meeting between Swofford’s parents and the Staff Sergeant did not result in Swofford entering the USMC at age 17. Young Anthony Swofford would eventually join the military six months later, but back then he was devastated to realize how his parents altered his fate.

“What would I do with myself? […] I wanted to be a killer, to kill

my country’s enemies. […] I needed the Marine Corps now, I needed the

Marine Corps to save me from other life I’d fail at […]” (Swofford, 207)

He felt that USMC was the only way for him and he felt prepared for it and ready to join the ranks (The Book Show #1246). The greater was the sense of defeat, when he could not follow his calling.

In the interview for WAMC3 he states that he perfectly understands the reasons of his parents for postponing his application for the USMC, since the promise of making a fine killer out of one’s child does not intrigue as much parents as expected, but still the disenchantment was beyond measure for the teenager (The Book Show #1246).

3 Northeast Public Radio

5.4 THE NATURE OF SWOFFORD’S WAR After providing the details and analysis of Swofford’s pre-military life I will now focus on the major factor of his narrative and that is the introduction of American armed forces, including Swofford’s unit, into the conflict that would become to be known as the First Gulf War.

In this part of my thesis I will analyze Swofford’s mind-set, during his deployment in the Desert and the major events that played role in shaping him into the author, who wrote the Jarhead.

Soon after his arrival at the airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on August 14, 1990,

Swofford states that it matters little to him and his fellow Marines how the war will end.

He is not there to care about politics, however absurd he might find them- he is there to kill, and likely be killed, just two days after his twentieth birthday (Swofford, 10).

“[…] we laugh to obscure the tragedy of […] 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 and

oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defense, Dick

Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush […] And at this point

we also know that the outcome of the conflict is less important for us- the

men who will fight and die- than for the old white fuckers and others

who have billions of dollars to gain or lose […]” (Swofford, 11).

This tragic note that Swofford brings up in his book, first published in 2003, just some three weeks before the beginning of the controversial second invasion to Iraq, which the UN did not give clearance for, resonates in minds of many people and not just the military personnel. What is so unnerving about this statement is that Swofford, and 23

likely other people, knew about how bizarre the conflict is, but unlike the non-military population Swofford did not have the chance to voice his opinion. Broyles comes with this statement: “The truth is, the reasons don’t matter. There is a reason for every war and a war for every reason.“ (Broyles, 1984) and it can be applied to Swofford’s situation perfectly. His tour of duty must be fulfilled, no matter what the personal feelings, about the conflict, are. But still, he is very frank about what he thinks about the nature of the conflict “[…] we fought for the oil-landed families living in the places deep with gold, shaded by tall and courtly palm trees.” (Swofford, 240).

A question rises what have all these people been doing in the Desert during their stay there. Trooper’s primary occupation, for the time being, was to wait and keep hydrated, as Swofford states (Swofford, 11). That is what they did most of the time, but during their waiting and hydrating, the real labor occurred inside their heads.

“We look north toward what we’re told is a menacing military,

four hundred thousand or more war-torn and war-savvy men. Some of

the Iraqi soldiers who fought during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War

(September 1980 to August 1988) began tasting combat when we were

ten years old.” (Swofford, 11)

Even before the actual fighting begins the Iraq armed forces have the upper hand in the psychological warfare. This is happening without their participation. Their infamous status is a hear-say based on something somebody heard somewhere, but even something like this has a profound effect on the morale of the young Americans.

After their six weeks in the Kingdom of Saud a spark of excitement appears- the reporters are finally coming. First civilians, who would meet the deployed Marines in weeks, the atmosphere among the men was close to ecstatic.

“Knowing the reporters will arrive soon, we shave for the first

time in a week, pull new cammies from the bottoms of our rucks, and

helmet-wash our pits and crotches and cocks. Vann’s wife sent him a

bottle of cologne, and we each dab a bit on our neck and our chest.”

(Swofford, 13)

But the excitement does not get to last long as the commanding officer Sergeant

Dunn and Staff Sergeant Siek tells the men what topics they will avoid in the conversations with the reporters. The outspoken voice of the group is Kuehn who says the public thoughts “This is censorship. You’re telling me what I can and can’t say to the press. That is un-American.” (Swofford, 14) the immediate response from Staff

Sergeant Siek is: “You do as you’re told. You signed the contract. You have no rights

[…] There is no such thing as speech that is free.” (Swofford, 14). The men are not happy with this, but there is not a thing they can do, because Siek is right- they are government property and now they must learn how to act like such.

And the reporters are very much aware of the fact, that the men were already scripted. They know because they have been told the same proud patriotic lines in every camp they have been to and there is no chance to hear something true, anything different form the usual lines the young Marines have to offer, such as “Yes, ma’am, I believe in our mission […] I’m proud of our president standing up to the evil […] This is about freedom, not oil […] I’m proud to serve my country […] I’m proud of what the

Corps has made me.” (Swofford, 16)

This does not mean that the men do not feel the need to speak to the reporters one on one about the way they feel about the whole operation. Swofford gets the closest to expressing his thoughts, when he is offered a football by the reporter, which he throws with a fellow squad mate, while the reporter is with them.

“I don’t care about human rights violations in Kuwait City.

Amnesty International, my ass. Rape them all, kill them all, sell their oil,

pillage their gold, sell their children into prostitution. I don’t care about

the Flag and God and Country and Corps. I don’t give a fuck about oil

and revenue and million barrels per day and U.S. jobs. […] I’m twenty

years old and I was dumb enough to sign a contract […] I can hear their

bombs and I am afraid.” (Swofford, 17)

Swofford feels this anxiety after weeks in the all invading sand and the endless waiting. This monologue proves that no matter how rigorous the brainwashing and the indoctrination of the famed fighting force is the individual still survives to think critically about the situation they are put in. The statement itself is full of force. It is a call of desperation of a young and lost soul. Any amount of the processed truth, which the command offers, does not help the individual get over the absurdity of the situation.

Swofford is young and unimpressed and most of all he is afraid, because the end of his life seems almost within a hand’s reach.

5.4.1 ABOUT FOOTBALL AND FIELD FUCK What immediately follows the time killing activity of throwing the ball is the infamous and dehumanizing MOPP suit football game. Broyles’s quote “War, since it steals our youth, offers a sanction to play boys’ games.” (Broyles, 1984) could not be more accurate. To add even more volume to the absurdity of the situation, the suits are

in jungle camouflage. This would surely prove to be an extreme tactical advantage in the desert. During the game, the heat inside the suit reaches 60 degrees Celsius. “I think of fighting with this gear on and I hope, more than anything, that if we are going to war, and they are going to kick our asses, that they’ll do it with an A-bomb […] And soon.”

(Swofford, 19).

Siek calls the teams for a demonstration of the drinking tubes build into the

MOPP suits to tell the reporters “Aren’t we smart, we’ve thought of everything.”

(Swofford, 19) but the demonstration goes poorly as the men have been carrying the suits around for weeks and now most of the suits are not in the shape that could protect the wearer. Swofford decides to make the situation even more unfavorable for Staff

Sergeant Siek as he, with his existentialist attitude, says: “I requested a new gas mask four months ago […] we have unserviceable filters in our masks. We’re all dead. We are the ghosts of STA 2/7.” (Swofford, 20), this enrages Siek even further and he orders the men to resume the game. The men are exhausted and their morale is falling apart.

During the resumed game the situation escalates into a human pyramid fight for the king of the mountain. Siek lost control of his men and nobody is capable of stopping them. And the reporters are all there to witness how America’s finest behave in extreme conditions. The Field Fuck is about to commence. What the Field Fuck demonstrates is the men’s resistance, a fight against all odds, a shriek of defiance in the face of vanity, all shaped into a scene during, during which the men grab their buddy Kuehn and act out a rape scene.

“I feel frightened and exhilarated by the scene. The exhilaration

isn’t sexual, it’s communal- a pure surge of passion and violence and

shared anger, a pure distillation of our confusion and hope and shared

fear. We aren’t field-fucking Kuehn; we’re fucking the press-pool

colonel[…] and President Bush and Dick Cheney and the generals, and

Saddam Hussein […] we’re fucking our confusion and fear and boredom;

we’re fucking ourselves for signing the contract […] we’re angry and

afraid and acting the way we’ve been trained to kill, violently and with

no remorse […] (Swofford, 22)

This quote is a portrait of Swofford’s, and not only his, feelings about the whole adventure in the Desert. I see it as one of the fundamental scenes of the book, because through Swofford’s explicit language, the audience receives the kind of feeling the men had and can relate to the various subjects touched by Swofford. It is because the men are young, full of sexual energy and taught a set of murdering skills, that this ventilation of all the negatives manifests itself as a violent sexual act, with which the men shake off and laugh off the built up stress and other negative influences like confusion, distrust of the Government or boredom, which Swofford mentions.

Boredom is a well known phenomena of military life and another author of a war narrative refers to it, acknowledging Swofford himself “Our days overflowed with extreme boredom […] I remembered the painful vigil of waiting described in Jarhead,

Anthony Swofford’s classic Gulf War memoir” (Rieckhoff, Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's

Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington, 26).

After this scene Swofford faints and has a flashback into childhood in Japan, as I have analyzed before. If there was any punishment from Staff Sergeant Siek, which is very likely to have been, it is not mentioned and it is right to presume that no punishment could spoil the great vent of the Field Fuck.

Field Fuck as helpful as it is for the audience, it does not provide with much of long-term help. Swofford still does not feel any better over the situation. He could be at peace with the lies he is fed by the chain of command and the heat and sand of the

Desert, he could be even at peace with the enemy he is in war with, but he cannot get to be at peace with himself.

5.4.2 WRITING HOME AND SEXUAL FRUSTRATION On occasional down-time, which seems more than occasional during the war,

Swofford writes many letters. These letters serve as a means of escaping the present.

“At times I thought I might write myself away, fit my entire body and mind into a few thick envelopes, and that way, as a stowaway, escape the ghastly end that awaited me.”

(Swofford, 37)

Letters play another role in the narrative. A role of much different than the one of soothing. The letters from home are almost never soothing for Swofford. The most problematic are the letters from Swofford’s girlfriend Kristina, who is unfaithful,

Swofford believes.

“Kristina, the woman I’m currently supposed to love, the woman

who is supposed to love me, is having sex with someone else […] I know

the sex is occurring, because she has called him a good friend and a great

listener […] I imagined that soon she’d be sleeping with one of the

[hotel] clerks.” (Swofford, 69)

Whether or not Kristina was faithful remains unseen, but it matters little to

Swofford as his mind is set on the impulses she had provided him with. After his contemplation about the fidelity of his girlfriend, comes his suicide attempt, which is stopped by his platoon mate Troy. Earlier in my thesis I have put forth the reasons for

his near suicide as not to be linked with Kristina’s actions back home. Those reasons are much heavier pro-suicide arguments, certainly more profound compared to partner’s infidelity.

Swofford mentions Kristina when he gets drunk, in this scene he starts burning the letters he received from Kristina. He is sure of the impermanence of things, namely relationships, which are artificially held together by the need of the moment. “In the lower right corner of her letters, two imp-like creatures are holding hands under a palm tree, with a caption floating in clouds that reads “Tony and Kristina Forever.” The stationery makes me ill […]” (Swofford, 91).

This passage is evidence of Swofford not valuing his relationship with Kristina.

It is a proof that he is emotionally distant from the life he left back home. This distance is disturbing since he does no longer feel engaged in personal matters outside the military world.

His emotional distance is even more stressed out when he holds an auction of

Kristina’s seminude photos. The auction is a failure as the only buyer backs down because “[…] That bitch is damaged goods,” Troy says. “Right now she’s dorking some hotel clerk. Unfaithful is unfaithful. I don’t want her photo. I got better jerking material in my head. […]” (Swofford, 90)

Swofford draws a line behind his relationship, when he attaches the photos to the

Wall of Shame, a place where marines put up the photos of their unfaithful partners for all other marines to be aware. Motivation for a public display of the fact that one was betrayed by their loved ones is always different and Swofford does not provide any analysis why would anybody want to perform this symbolic pillory of the other person.

He attaches Kristina’s photos and inscribes a message for other marines “I don’t know, but I’ve been told she’s seeing someone new.” (Swofford, 92). He minimizes his status of the one being betrayed through the act of becoming a remote viewer (Peebles,

Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq, 31).

Swofford blames the amount of undirected sexual energy, the sexual frustration of the marines, to the fact, that there is no place in Saudi Arabia to ventilate it, unlike other places, where the Americans have waged their wars (Swofford, 92).

Since there are no women to be seen in the general vicinity of the marines, they feel this way. Unlike in other conflicts, there is not a single native woman to be looked at, raped, bought or courted. This is troubling for the young men as they were used to a vast amount of sexual experiences during their training deployment in the Philippines.

Swofford during his war experience in the Desert mentions only once a native woman and aside from the reporter, who visited them, she is the only woman in the Desert.

This single woman is encountered, when the unit is passed by a Saudi Mercedes-

Benz with a male driver and a woman passenger wearing a hijab. The marines left a poor image concerning their manners.

“Crocket stands in the back of the Humvee [and] puts his other

hand to his mouth, licking his tongue between two fingers […] woman

sits alone in the backseat of the car, and I watch her eyes follow

Crocket’s crude gesture. I don’t know if she’s registering shock or

confusion of disgust […] and Crocket says, “that bitch will never forget

me. She wanted me.” (Swofford, 140)

Through this act the men fail to establish any friendly connection with the native woman or the natives in general. The immediate argument might be that the marines are not there to make friends. Even though this argument is valid, the truth is that, as Stacey

L. Peebles states, “These soldiers fight as representatives of the nation […]” (Peebles,

25) and as such the marines fail to express the famous hearts and minds methodology adopted by the U.S. military. For comparison a fellow combatant, Rieckhoff, establishes friendly terms with the native he dubbed as Big Foot, by getting him a pair of new shoes and he comments on this situation “One pair of shoes has done more than a hundred bullets could ever have to win that man to our side forever.” (Rieckhoff, 245).

This scene marks a clash of cultures but also brings up the topic of sexual frustration in the military. Swofford ends the chapter after this scene and offers the audience no further comment on the subject, because there is no further comment needed, the scene is self-explanatory. Stacey L. Peebles focuses on the connection between sexual frustration and violence depicted in Jarhead in the first chapter of her work. Her arguments are sound, but nothing new on the topic compared to William

Broyles and his work on the topic. Furthermore she makes factual mistakes like labeling

Swofford as an infantry man instead of a scout/sniper, despite he clearly states himself

“above” the average infantry man on many occasions throughout the book, this is also something Geoffrey A. Wright points out in his review of Peebles’s book (2011, 241).

The sexual frustration that the men feel is likely to lead to further acts of violence, which eventually do occur. While most men in the truck refrained to partake in the vulgar act, Crocket, the unmarried man, committed fully. Another clearly sexually frustrated man is Fowler, who is always chasing prostitutes during leave. But now, there is no shore leave to vent his urges in sight. It is also Fowler, first violating

the conventions of warfare, when he shoots and kills a Bedouin camel and, further on in

Swofford’s narrative, proceeds to hack and disfigure the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers

(Swofford 162).

The profound connection between sex and violence has been explored in an article on the web page of Psychology today.

“[…] war-like societies intentionally cultivate sexual frustration

in young men because their resulting aggressiveness makes them better

soldiers, much like boxing trainers making fighters swear off women.

Criminologists have long known that unmarried young men commit the

bulk of the crimes in the United States.“ (Ryan, On Sex and Violence)

And Swofford wholeheartedly confirms the message related in the article. “And the pleasure of [violence] is like the pleasure of cocaine or a good rough fuck.”

(Swofford, 64). In his work Why Men Love War (1984), William Broyles also proposes this link between sex and war.

“It’s lure is the fundamental human passion to witness, to see

things, what the Bible calls lust for the eye and the Marines in Vietnam

called eye fucking […] Most men who have been to war, and most

women who have been around it, remember that never in their lives did

they have so heightened a sexuality. War is, in short, a turn-on.” (Broyles,

1984).

What seems to relieve the sexual tension these men feel are the, so called, Any

Marine letters. These are letters usually written by young women to provide

encouragement to unknown fighting men. Obviously, the most valued letters are those, which have explicit content.

“Atticus’s letter is […] from a recent university dropout: I just

quit Yale. I like to fuck a lot and drop acid. Write me soon if you like to

fuck a lot and drop acid. Thanks. Obviously, Atticus has hit the vein. The

other Any Marines look defeated. […] I like to fuck a lot and drop acid

becomes one of our rallying calls, better than Ohh-rah or Semper fi.

Atticus writes the Acid Girl […] She never replies. This saddens us all.”

(Swofford, 142)

These letters are not meant to create any long term relationships. They are only there to provide the authors with a feeling that they are doing their part for the Coalition to Free Kuwait. The men gather for some fun and sometimes excitement (as it was with the Acid Girl). The purpose is served and soon it is a burden. “Eventually so many Any

Marine letters are floating around battalion that they’ve become a nuisance.” (Swofford,

143)

Troy tells Swofford to stop thinking about the Any Marines letters or the letters, which Swofford writes to several women he had (or wishes) to have sex with. This comes after Swofford receives photos from his mother’s wedding and since he is obviously taken by those images Troy comments on them.

“[Troy] says, “Hell, Swoff, it looks to me like your mom just

married some fat dude. Bitch didn’t even ask your permission […] she

can’t wait for you to come home before she goes and gets married. […]”

“I think some people are waiting […] Jenn and Katherine are

waiting for me.”

“[…] Jenn and Katherine only know the bullshit you write to

them. If you were in the States, they wouldn’t write those letters to you.”

(Swofford, 148)

In this excerpt Troy provides Swofford with explanations for reasons, why different people write to Swofford. In the end of this scene Swofford undergoes a drastic change of relationship with his mother. Lisa-Andrea Glatz comments on

Swofford’s relationship with women in her essay and remarks that the only all positive relationship he has, a relationship which works for both sides involved, is the mother- son relationship. (Glatz, of the Gulf War and other Battles, 1). It comes as somewhat of an epiphany to Swofford and he manages to realize that the world outside his war does not stop for other people, who are not a part of the war effort, and wait for him. This realization brings him no closer to clarity or comfort.

5.4.3 THE PAIN OF (NOT) KILLING In this section I will focus on the two important scenes of the book, which revolve around the acquisition of a kill. These scenes concern the possibility of killing a friendly and Swofford’s first confirmed kill-to-be.

Friendly fire ranks among the most lamentable things, which occur in war. Its dictionary definition is follows:

“friendly fire (noun), during a war, shooting that is hitting you from your own

side, not from the enemy“ (Cambridge Dictionary)

This occurs in most cases accidentally, because the soldiers are, under normal circumstances, careful enough not to endanger their fellow soldiers by inaccurate fire.

That was not Swofford’s case. What triggered the situation was the incompetence of

Swofford and his inability to promote clearly the benefits of staying awake during night watch to Dettmann.

Swofford got to be the highest ranking member of the team, while the team leader was away and it was his duty to ensure that nothing goes poorly the night before the team’s first opportunity for rifle time at a long range in three months. And things go poorly as Dettmann falls asleep and the team oversleeps and misses their time at the range (Swofford, 98).

Since Swofford is the highest ranking person he also takes the fall for

Dettmann’s failure. The punishment is thorough- he is forced to drink vast quantities of water and perform various calisthenics until he vomits only to repeat the cycle many times over. But the worst punishment for Swofford is the shitter detail, where he is supposed to burn the waste of the whole company for a week. He is eventually so infuriated with Dettmann that he threatens him with his rifle loaded with live ammunition.

“I know this is crazy and reckless, but I think Dettmann might

learn something, I don’t know what. And I know that if in a second I say

Fuck it and pull the trigger, I’ll be able to lie my way through an

accidental discharge […] I’ll be the fuck out of Saudi Arabia and the

endless waiting and the various other forms of mental and physical waste,

and also, I’ll finally know what it feels like to kill a man.” (Swofford,

103)

During this tense moment Swofford is extremely calm. All the training and practice of killing the USMC thought him has paid off, for he is absolutely capable of killing a man with no remorse. He is eager to pull the trigger and be done with it, where it stands for many things, such as getting rid of the waiting and knowing, what killing a person is like. If he would kill Dettmann he would also kill all he believed and aspired to as a marine, he would willingly inflict harm to a fellow marine. But Swofford states, that he feels more in common with the Iraqi soldiers than with Dettmann, who was still at home, when Swofford landed in Riyadh (Swofford, 104). Swofford forces Dettmann to repeat after him the a famous excerpt from Rifleman’s Creed4 and it is only when

Dettmann seems to undergo something close to a religious epiphany, that Swofford ends the madness with releasing the magazine from the weapon and placing the round from the chamber into Dettmann’s mouth.

This scene counts as one of the most disturbing scenes in the book, because of the above mentioned facts. Swofford wants to kill and with no enemies in sight and all the tension inside he chooses to kill the one, who is responsible for the punishment of the group, acting as the loss of the firing range privilege, and his personal humiliation with latrine disposal. Killing Dettmann could even be seen as a continuity of the military tradition of punishment for those who slept on their guard, as R. G. Grant puts it in his book Soldier (2007). Grant gives an example stating that it was desirable for

4 This creed was created for USMC by Major General W. H. Rupertus during World War II. The mentioned excerpt can be found in G. Hasford’s Short-timers (1979) and is as follows:

“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.” 37

Roman soldiers to beat to death their squad mates, who were found asleep during their guard duty (Grant, 28).

There is never an explanation why Swofford did not pull the trigger. The question, which this scene proposes is what were Swofford’s motives for not killing

Dettmann and if he really was capable of killing him.

After the evidence I put forth from Swofford’s narrative I came to the conclusion that Swofford was perfectly capable of killing the other man and he was willing to go great lengths to prove it. As he states it- killing or not was a split second decision to him and both decisions were equally valuable. What were the motives for not killing

Dettmann is never stressed. I believe that it is not important for the analysis of the narrative what they were. What is always more important is the result, which in this case was a spared human life. If Swofford would kill the man, he would confirm his own insanity and the inability to be nothing more than a killing machine and as Pvt.

Joker in Full Metal Jacket states, “The Marine Corps doesn’t want robots. The Marine

Corps wants killers.” (Kubrick, 1987). Swofford is a physically and mentally worn out person with an exceptional set of murdering skills, but certainly not a deranged murderer or a robot.

The second scene I will focus on in this section concerns the first actual exchange of fire between Swofford’s unit and the enemy forces. It happened after more than six months of deployment in the Saudi Arabia and it finally earned Swofford his

Combat Action Ribbon, an occasion that moved him close to tears of joy (Swofford,

190).

In February of 1991, Swofford’s unit comes under enemy artillery fire. Looking back on this occasion Swofford provides commentary for it in a radio interview with the remark, that “I’ve survived war and I lived with this thrilling intoxicating knowledge that I’ve come close to death, but lived.” (The Book Show #1246). He finally got closer to death than ever before. After the immediate threat of being killed by a enemy artillery is over, and being a part of the STA5 platoon, Swofford and his two colleagues are ordered to find the enemy forward observers responsible for calling in the strike and eliminate them by calling their own artillery on their position.

Thanks to their expertise the three marines locate the enemy bunker and are ready to call in the bombing, when a captain from a different unit comes in and insists that it will be him, who will direct the fire mission. Since having a lower rank, they have to obey and Swofford is deprived of his first kill.

“I’ve never witnessed the extermination of human life […] In the dust cloud floating slowly down the ridge I imagine that I can see the last breaths of these men now dead.” (Swofford, 191)

The scene is marked by the fascination found in the precise bombardment, a cocktail of smoke and anti-bunker shells (Swofford, 191). No longer is there need for storming the enemy position and losing many during the attempt. This is military progress in its purest form- killing more and losing less. It is a death sentence to the theory that „[…] with history would come progress, and with progress, peace.” Which

Broyles himself sees as very flawed, stating that progress only makes the killing more horrible (Broyles, 1984).

5 Surveillance and Target Acquisition, today renamed to Scout/Sniper platoon

Coming the closest to acquiring a kill and the closest to being killed by the enemy had a profound effect on Swofford. The marine captain stole his two kills away from him (Swofford believes that there were two operators in the bunker, 257), although he had a massive part in the killing of those men, because it was him, who acquired the coordinates for the airstrike on the enemy bunker. Swofford could easily claim these kills if he would like because he tried hard enough to get them, like Broyles “I don’t know if I killed anyone in Vietnam, but I tried as hard as I could. I fired at muzzle flashes in the night, threw grenades during ambushes, ordered artillery and bombing where I thought the enemy was.“ (Broyles, 1984). The last part of the quote is important since it marks the same situation Swofford was in. But the most important factor for

Swofford is that it was not him, who gave the executive order to fire in anger.

By not killing the people, a task he was trained to do and eager to fulfill,

Swofford passed another milestone in his life. If the situation was handed the way he would like, he would kill the men, but that did not happen and he was forced by the rank of the captain to back down and in awe watch the obliteration of the enemy.

Swofford does not earn a kill, which is one of the most desired things in his life. All his military life is fixed to this one point- to kill. And like Jeffrey Gross sums up- the result of the mission is secondary to the acquisition of a kill (Gross, Boyish Play and Manifest

Destiny: The Transition from Civilizer to Killer in America and Abroad, 72).

5.4.4 THE ANTI-ANTI-WAR MOVIES In the war’s prelude the men watch Vietnam War movies like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to get pumped and ready for the killing. Why they concentrate on the movies set during the Vietnam War is explained by Swofford as follows “[…] it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals.” (Swofford, 6). The experience of the Vietnam War is crucial to those men, 40

their lives depend on that experience and the movies serve as illustrations for their training manuals. There is no shortage of the footage because, as Garret Stewart states, the Vietnam War was a “TV War” (Stewart, Digital fatigue: Imaging war in recent

American film, 47). Not only entertainment is found in the footage, but also warning and perhaps a way how to “slip under the wires” if they try to pull something like their heroes on the screen. These movies are labeled as anti-war by their creators Kubrick,

Coppola and others, but for Swofford and his friends they are all pro-war (Swofford, 6).

Gross states that the actual Vietnam experience has little effect on them compared to the imaginary Vietnam experience- the one of raping, killing and pillaging (Gross, 70). The idea of anti-war movies is not something invented by Kubrick or Stone, during the

1920s, in Germany there was a concept, that vivid images of war would help guide society away from further war, this was apparently a fool’s hope and Swofford and others confirm this (Noddings, War, critical thinking, and self-understanding, 491).

Apparently this watching of war movies and enjoying the rush they give to the military people is a common practice, as Rieckhoff also confesses to it. The difference of his case is his awareness of the fact that he is going to be the bad guy, the invader and that his participation in war might help create freedom fighters he links directly to Red

Dawn protagonist Jed Eckert (Rieckhoff, 6). But as noted by Swofford and his unit, they have little interest in the anti-war message of the movies. War movies are the pornography for military men.

Broyles recalls the scene in Apocalypse Now, where Robert Duvall’s character is visibly saddened by the inevitable end of the war. Not the fact, that the war might be lost or won, but the fact that all the burning and pillaging will end. He states, that the character is clearly meant to be a psychopath and that the audience is amused by the absurdity of that character, who enjoys decorating enemy dead with playing cards and 41

riding into battle with Wagner’s music thundering from the speakers. But the ending result is different when applying the equation for the military, as he comments on the occasion when U.S. soldiers reenacted the infamous Ride of the Valkyries during their invasion of Grenada (Broyles, 1984).

5.4.5 RELIGION IN THE USMC Swofford mentions religion in the book’s last excerpt. His relationship to religion is difficult to comprehend for a non-military person. Swofford was brought up as a catholic. He even says that he enjoyed being an altar boy and that he stated his belief as catholic, when he joined the USMC and became a lay reader for other catholic recruits (Swofford, 171). But during the boot camp his faith started to crumble because of the contradictory nature of being a trained killer and believing in mercy.

“I recognized the incompatibility of religion and the military […] the

mission of the military: to extinguish the lives and livelihood of other humans.

What [else] all of those bombs are for?” (Swofford, 172)

So it is safe to assume that Swofford, at that time during his stay with the military, abandoned his catholic faith for the USMC’s goal- to extinguish the lives of other people marked by the nation’s leaders as the enemy. But even during his time in the Corps he had developed some sort of animistic religion, which he shared with other military personnel. This religion was based on the proliferation of one’s dog tags. The owner’s dog tags would be placed in various places, locations ranging from favorite prostitute’s mattress to one’s childhood tree fort. It is believed by the practitioners of this dog tag spreading cult that if a person, has so many dog tags distributed around the globe, it is impossible for them to die. For Swofford, at that time, it is considered the

only true religion there is (Swofford, 174). In later years, out of the military, he found fragments of his more conventional faith, as foreshadowed by the epilogue of the book.

5.4.6 THE WAR’S END The end of Swofford’s war is much like its beginning- vague, blurred by the poor communication and the abstractness of the concept of war itself. It is hard to believe that a war is going on, when there are no visible traces of war and it is even harder to believe that this mirage war is over, after endless months of waging it.

Swofford and his squad mate were sent to observe the battle for an airfield. He for the first times sees the enemy but is not allowed to take the shots, once again. This time it is, because the Iraqi soldiers want to surrender (Swofford, 231).

The following day, they are left in the field without extraction. They assume that their camp was raided by the enemy and head to its location on foot only to find their fellow marines celebrating the end of the war. Swofford does not want to believe the fact that the war has ended and only gives in after Sergeant Siek comes back from

Kuwait City with the official news (Swofford, 235).

“I want a buzz or anything to fill the onset of a nameless

emptiness. […] No one notices me. Their war stories march through my

brain like a parade of epileptics. My stomach turns. I vomit. It feels as

though I’m regurgitating the last seven months of my life. This is how I

welcome the peace.” (Swofford, 236)

In the waning days of Swofford’s deployment, his unit was ordered to sweep the enemy positions in Kuwait, but they encountered no resistance or any living enemy soldiers (Swofford, 237). After some six weeks of organizing the logistics of humans, the marines return home for parades, celebrations and further life. 43

5.5 LOOKING BACK Swofford admits a certain degree of despair in his life. This despair is visible even to the outside observers “[…] mother told this […] “I lost my baby boy when you went to war. You were once so sweet and gentle and now you are an angry and unhappy man […]” (Swofford, 248).

Swofford’s despair comes from many sources, mainly from other people’s misunderstanding of why are men spared of death on the battlefield. He believes that

“[men] are spared for the single purpose of spreading the bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom […]”

(Swofford, 253). But not all men do this and he considers them the greatest danger for the wellbeing of the people “These men are liars and cheats and they gamble with your freedom and your life and the lives of your sons and daughters and the reputation of your country.” (Swofford, 255). He attacks the thought equation that winning, i.e. surviving, a war will guarantee further success, pleasure and happiness, because this would only lead other people into despair provided by war (Blackmore, War X: Human extensions in battlespace, 193). This statement goes directly against what Broyles’s

Vietnam War veteran friend Hiers says: “What people can’t understand is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it.” (Broyles, 1984). This is the man, who is the real danger

Swofford warns about.

The author claims that one of the greatest battles of the book is his personal defeat, when he is not allowed to kill the men (The Book Show #1246). In the epilogue of his narrative Swofford states that back then he was angry with the captain, but now he is thankful that the captain pulled rank and insisted on him being the one, who will give the order to kill the enemy personnel.

“[…] sometimes when I am feeling hopeful or even religious, I

think that by taking my two kills the pompous captain handed me life,

some extra moments of living for myself or that I can offer others,

though I have no idea how to use or disburse these extra moments, or if

I’ve wasted them already.” (Swofford, 257)

Swofford, like Rieckhoff and many others according to Peebles, start to tell their story (Peebles, ii). For Swofford it is an obligation to start talking about his war „[…] because I signed the contract and fulfilled my obligation to fight in one of America’s wars, I am entitled to speak […] and you must listen.” (Swofford, 254) It is his way to move from the despair, the nightmarish glass in his belly, which he cannot cough out, because he was not shot, because he is still alive (Swofford, 125) and, perhaps, it is also a way to relieve someone else of their despair. Here, it is best to apply Nel Noddings’s quote:

“[…] we need to read many stories if we are to cultivate love and

commitment. Critical thinking alone may not induce commitment and

may even encourage a “spectator” attitude toward the world’s problems.”

(Noddings, 492).

6. CONCLUSION In this thesis I have presented an analysis of Jarhead: a Marine's chronicle of the Gulf War and other battles, first published in 2003. Through the course of my thesis

I have followed and analyzed Swofford’s narrative techniques and his narrative style. I have explored the unreliable narration based on Fludernik’s ideas and described the main characters involved in the plot. I have done this to make the reader’s comprehension of the text easier since Swofford’s narrative is not simple to follow as he frequently moves from one period of time to another and he switches between locations.

As well as this, I have provided some insight into Swofford’s family background and its influence on the novel itself.

A major factor I studied throughout the text is the transformation from being a jarhead to the now educated and elevated person- Swofford the writer, the teacher and the father. This I propose in the three chosen occasions mentioned and analyzed in chapter four. In the first occasion he decided to become a marine. This moment affected him from early adolescence to the age of 17, when he actually became a marine, a milestone in his life. During the second occasion, Swofford is already waiting to participate in combat, but the person he is closest to killing is himself. In this moment he realizes that he does not own the courage to take his life, thus moving further to the understanding of oneself. And the last, but not least, moment shows vital information about Swofford’s transformation as he realizes that he can cope with certain events only through further acquisition of experience.

I thoroughly analyze the particular aspects of Swofford’s war, among others I concentrate on the acquisition of a kill and the sensation of (not) acquiring it. In this section I rely heavily on the article written by William Broyles Jr. Why Men Love War.

The article’s author is frank towards its readership and provides many similarities and links to the situations, which Swofford faces in his war and on them I apply Broyles’ findings.

Besides these main topics, I touch upon the others, such as religion, sexual frustration, distrusting the government and father-son relationship to provide further commentary for the text, which frequently leaves the reader with no further explanations for the taken course of action.

In my work I provide a complex analysis of Swofford’s narrative. I wanted to point out that although it is not written as a typical popular culture war narrative, which goes glorifying the American ideals, it found an immense amount of readers, both inside and outside, of the military spheres.

Works Cited

Primary sources

Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead: a Marine's chronicle of the Gulf War and other battles.

Scribner, 2005. Print.

Secondary sources

"The Book Show #1246 - Anthony Swofford." WAMC. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.

"friendly fire." Dictionary.Cambridge.org. Cambridge Dictionaries Online, 2013. Web.

12 Mar. 2013.

"Interview with Anthony Swofford." Combustible Celluloid. Web. 24 Mar. 2013.

Anonymous. A Marine officer: I’m leaving the Corps because it doesn’t much value ideas. 2011.

ricks.foreignpolicy.com. Web. 20 Mar 2013.

Anothony Swofford: Bio."Anothony Swofford: Bio." N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2013.

Blackmore, Tim. War X: Human extensions in battlespace. University of Toronto Press,

2005. Web. 9 Feb. 2013.

Broyles Jr, William. "Why men love war." Esquire, November 55 (1984). Web. 13 Jan.

2013.

Caputo, Philip. "A Rumor of War. 1977." New York: Owl (1996). Print.

Ferklová, Sofie. Fight Club: A Comparative Analysis of the Novel and the Film. Brno:

Masarykova Univerzita, 2011. Informační systém Masarykovy univerzity. Web.

8 Feb. 2013.

Fonioková, Zuzana. Bending Facts Within and Beyond the Borders of Unreliabl

Narration in Selected Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch. Brno:

Masarykova Univerzita, 2009. Informační systém Masarykovy univerzity. Web.

18 Mar. 2013.

Glatz, Lisa-Andrea.

the Gulf War and other Battles. GRIN Verlag, 2006. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

Grant, Reg, and R. G. Grant. Soldier. Dorling Kindersley, 2009. Print.

Gross, Jeffrey. "Boyish Play and Manifest Destiny: The Transition from Civilizer to

Killer in America and Abroad." South Atlantic Review 73.2 (2008): 59 80. Web.

2 Jan. 2013.

Hasford, Gustav. The short-timers. Harper & Row, 1979. Print.

Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America. Indiana University Press, 1989.

Web. 2 Jan. 2013.

Kubrick, Stanley dir. Full Metal Jacket. Perf. Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey

and Vincent D'Onofrio. Warner Bros. Pictures: 1987. Film.

Noddings, Nel. "War, critical thinking, and self-understanding." Phi delta kappan 85.7

(2004): 489-495. Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

Peebles, Stacey Lyn. Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's

Experience in Iraq. Cornell University Press, 2011. Web. 8 Feb. 2013. 49

Rieckhoff, Paul. Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America from Baghdad to

Washington. NAL Caliber, 2006. Web. 10 Jan. 2013.

Ryan, Christopher. "On Sex and Violence." Psychologytoday.com. N.p., 7 Aug. 2009.

Web. 10 Feb. 2013.

Stewart, Garrett. "Digital fatigue: Imaging war in recent American film." Film

Quarterly 62.4 (2009): 45-55. Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

Swofford, Anthony. "We Pretend the Vets Don't Even Exist."Newsweek. 28 May 2012:

n. page. Web. 22 Mar. 2013.

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Guernica. Guernica, 2012. Web. 22 Mar. 2013.

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Peebles. Review by: Geoffrey A. Wright. Rocky Mountain Review , Vol.

65, No. 2 (FALL 2011), pp. 240-242. Web. 22 Mar. 2013.

RÉSUMÉ IN ENGLISH This bachelor thesis is a narrative analysis of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead: a

Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and other Battles. Apart from defining the main literary terms and techniques, which the author uses in his writing, this work focuses on the analysis of literary aspects and motifs of Swofford’s war, as described in the book.

What I analyze in a chapter, which is separated from the main body of the narrative analysis, are the three characters, which I find as crucial for the development of the narrative. Concerning the plot, I analyze these characters, being Swofford himself; his platoon mate Troy and Swofford’s father, as well as three stages of the main character’s transformation: being ecstatic as a result of becoming a marine, the unfulfillment of the naïve expectations, frustration and the options it leaves. This progress at the same time reflects the development of the main character, by extension the author, who is one of the key factors of this thesis. In reflection to this I explore the relationship between anti- war movies and the military men as Swofford states these movies among the greatest influences during his military career, but the effect of the movies on the servicemen is questionable as I demonstrate in the subchapter The Anti-anti-war Movies. I also pay attention to and analyze the spiritual aura of the USMC mostly represented by the need to kill, in the subchapter named The Pain of (not) Killing.

RESUMÉ V ČEŠTINĚ Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá narativní analýzou knihy Mariňák: Vojákova kronika války v zálivu. Vedle definování hlavních literárních pojmů a technik, které autor ve svém díle používá, se tato práce orientuje na analýzu aspektů a motivů

Swoffordovy války popisovaných v knize a jejich vývoj. Ve zvláštní kapitole, která stojí odděleně od hlavní kapitoly analyzující děj, se věnuji rozboru postav, které jsou zcela 51

zásadní pro vývoj příběhu. Tyto postavy jsou: samotný Swofford, jeho kolega odstřelovač Troy a Swoffordův otec. Co se příběhu týče, tak se mimo jiné zaměřuji na tři fáze, které vedou k proměně hlavního hrdiny. Zmiňované fáze proměny jsou nadšení z bytí mariňákem, nenaplnění naivního očekávání, frustrace a její východiska. Tento vývoj událostí zároveň reflektuje vývoj hlavní postavy, potažmo tedy i autora, který je jedním z klíčových faktorů této bakalářské práce. S vědomím tohoto zkoumám vztah mezi protiválečnými filmy a příslušníky ozbrojených sil, protože Swofford o takových filmech tvrdí, že měly obrovský dopad na jeho vojenskou kariéru. Nicméně účinek, který na příslušníky ozbrojených sil mají je dosti sporný, jak dokazuji v podkapitole

Proti-protiválečné filmy. Stejně tak se věnuji a rozebírám magickou auru Námořní pěchoty Spojených Států zosobněnou v potřebě zabíjet, tak činím v podkapitole

Bolestné (ne)zabíjení.