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Jarhead:
A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony
Swofford Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Unscrewed There are times when Anthony Swofford writes
poetically in his memoir, Jarhead,
a story of his life in the Marines and service in the Gulf War. At other
times, Swofford writes with the salty tongue of one Marine talking to
another. He’s at his best when at either of those extremes. A lot of Jarhead
is somewhere in-between. Here’s an excerpt (pp. 123-5): The
man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward he turns
the rifle in at the armory and he believes he's finished with the rifle. But
no matter what else he might do with his hands— love a woman, build a house,
change his son's diaper—his hands remember the rifle and the power the rifle
proffered. The cold weight, the buttstock in the shoulder, the sexy slope and
fall of the trigger guard. Where do rifles come from? the man's son asks. The rifle stinks like wet earth, like from where it
came before being melted and molded into that sticklike form. And when you
run out of ammunition and you're lucky that the enemy has run out at the same
moment, you can beat the enemy with your rifle, as though the rifle were a
baton, or a branch from a thick oak. The man remembers this: there are many
different ways to fight and kill with the rifle. Supposedly, and according to tradition and lore,
the sniper needs only one bullet per kill. This is incorrect. The sniper
requires thousands of bullets and thousands of hours of training per kill; he
needs senior snipers on the deck beside him at the rifle range, telling him
why he is not producing a dime group from a grand out. (A dime group is three
shots that, when inspected on the target, can be covered with a dime.) There
are reasons you're not hitting a dime group at a grand. Your spotter called
the wind at five to eight but the wind is an eight to eleven. You hadn't
completely expelled your breath when you shot. You are afraid of the rifle. Your
spotter gave you the correct dope but you dialed the scope incorrectly. You
are tired. You are stupid. You are bored. You are a bad shot. You drank the
night before. You drank excessively the night before. You are worried about
Suzi Rottencrotch and her man Jody back home, in the hay or in the alley or
in a hotel bed. These are all unacceptable reasons for not achieving a dime
group at a grand. A nickel group is occasionally acceptable. A quarter group
and you are dead. You have missed the target but the target hasn't missed
you. You must remember that you are always a target. Someone wants to kill
you and their reasons are as sound as yours are for killing them. This is why
you must know the dime group like you once knew your mother's nipples.
Quarters are cheap. On your corpse no one will check the group, not even your
mother. Your enemy will be the last person to witness you as a living thing.
He'll acquire you through his optics and he will not pause before pulling the
trigger. The dream starts in November, after I read an
article in the Arab Times about the Iraqi Republican Guard
snipers. I'm a boy again, wearing the glasses I had as a
boy, and I'm on a quest, for what I don't know, in a land vaguely familiar
that sometimes resembles the alleys of Tokyo and sometimes my grammar school.
I might be looking for the denim jacket I lost on the playground in fifth
grade. I might be looking for the candy store. Women walk through the alleys
wearing red tights. Sometimes I try to sleep with them, and though I'm hard,
the tights keep me from penetrating, but I come on their tights. Money
changes hands. There's no logic for why I choose one woman over
another, or why any particular woman allows me to choose her. Once, the
nonact is consummated on a toilet. In the dream, no one speaks. Diseased dogs
roam the alleys, and addicts of either pills or drink or dope float above the
alleys as they take their preferred drug. I never find what I'm looking for.
I sweat throughout the dream. Eventually, I turn a corner out of the alley,
and a sniper shoots me in the left eye. The shot doesn't hurt, and I return
to the alley, and though my eye has been blown away, I still maintain vision
through the socket. I can see the hole that the projectile made in the
glasses lens. I begin coughing up pieces of shattered glass, but no blood
issues from my mouth, though as I cough the glass into the dirty alley, I
know my belly is stuffed with glass and that it might take me years to expel
all of it. As the clean glass hits the ground, I hear the sound of chimes
marking time though I can never figure the hour. This dream recurs every night, until the Scud missile
drills begin, and after that I’m unable to complete a full evening of sleep. Jarhead
is an unusual book, composed by a talented writer. Steve Hopkins, April 19, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Jarhead.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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