After seeing the many trailers for the movie JARHEAD - and having it recommended to me by a friend - I decided to pick up a copy of the AudioBook that the movie was based on from the iTunes Music Store. I drive 40 miles each way to and from work, so it gives a lot of time to listen to books, and hope to "improve myself." After reading the book, I suspended judgement and went to see the movie. My opinion did not change. The long and the short of it is that both the book and the movie are intensely despairing stories. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
JARHEAD tells the story of the author - Anthony Swafford - and his experiences surrounding the Marine Corps and the first Gulf War. Swafford always wanted to be a Marine, since hearing the stories of his heroic (and dead) uncle who had been a "jarhead." He joined right out of high school, as soon as he could legally sign his own induction contract, and served until shortly after Operation: Desert Storm. He writes, sometimes lyrically, about the brotherhood of the Marines, and the "killer culture" which has grown up around that branch of the military. But overall, he seems to view his time there as a waste, and his first glimpse that life is ultimately meaningless.
Swafford spends most of the book dwelling on the debauchery that he enjoyed while living as a marine. The abuse of his fellows, the unending drinking binges, the long line of prostitutes and willing partners in his bed, and his strong desire to kill all are spoken of with two voices. One that longs to go back and do it again. And another that wonders how he ever thought those activities worth his time. He views these acts as part of the culture of being a marine - that they show the toughness and invincibility of the modern warrior. But also a product of most of his fellow marines being stupid kids who don't know any better… who grow up into stupid officers and non-comms who don't care about anything better. He hates what he sees, but embraces it wholeheartedly.
The remainder of the book is focussed on his experiences in Saudi Arabia (waiting for the war), Kuwait (walking toward the war), and Iraq (finding out he missed the war). As a Maine sniper, Swafford's team was tasked with being at the front of the advancing ground forces. But the air war was so far ahead of any grunts on the ground, that he largely finds the battlefield full of already-blackened corpses and of the two firefights he finds himself in, one is with a careless American tank brigade. He walks for miles and miles in the desert, blinded by the sun, dehydrated by the heat, rubbed bloody by the sand, rained on by oil wells set ablaze, and ultimately forgotten by his own platoon when victory is declared. He never gets to fire a shot, and ultimately is left with a war where he walked, and walked, and walked to nowhere.
The lessons that Swafford draws from these experiences are twofold: (1) Life is meaningless, and (2) Life is only preferable to death, in that life allows for the possibility for change and thus temporary improvement. (My words, not his.) As a marine, Swafford toys with suicide. After the war, friends die in meaningless accidents and lose their minds to paranoia. Swafford sees only darkness and death in this world, and concludes from the emptyness of his life, that all of life is empty.
I found myself continually frustrated by the book and the movie by Swafford's stubborn focus on despair. He seems like he sees himself as Solomon - who tried every kind of life and found them wanting - but really, he has steered a very narrow life, experiencing little in the way of diversity, and drawn conclusions accordingly. Very early in his journey, he decided God was a myth and never looked back. Instead, the conclusions that seem more obvious to me is that his life was a pointer away from his choices, toward something better. If drunkenness and orgies and brawling are meaningless, does that mean life is meaningless? Or rather that the meaning is elsewhere? It is like picking up a lollypop from the ground, licking the side that is filthy with sand, dirty, and lint and concluding that all lollypops are disgusting.
I do not recommend the movie, unless you are specifically in the mood for something of this genre. It is an anti-war movie/book about the Gulf War, but you really learn very little about the war, and there is nothing philsophical in Swafford's dislike of battle. He thinks he is drawing deep and lasting conclusions about life, but is instead making them about his own narrow experiences. It is basically a recipe for depression, not for thoughtful review of either war or life or even the Marines.
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