Resumo de Jarhead - A Marine's Chronicle Of The Gulf War.

Swofford's Jarhead is touted as a marine's chronicle of the gulf war. It is much more than that. Jarhead is a forceful, intelligent, subtle, explorative and haunting tribute to a formative human experience. Swofford performs exploratory surgery on his own psyche. Systematically he hunts out events, experiences, indeed any suspicious occurrence within an intense personal time frame.

His story is centered around his time in Iraq as a scout/Sniper in 2/7 STA platoon during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Swofford's eyes as a frontline grunt are sharp, clean and unrelenting in communicating the increasingly absurd and twisted domain of modern warfare.

At one level it is how human fuel for the furnace of war is made. Like petrol the Jarhead is cracked, refined and distilled, pure until it is ready to burn, ready to kill. Yet Swofford's true talent is his acute awareness into this volatile state. Swofford?s Marine is a manic tinder of destructive contradictions. A tragic figure that is all at once, bleak, innovative, brutal, fragile, ignorant, intuitive, self preserving, fatalistic, intelligent yet single-minded.

It seems no amount of porn, masturbation or hooker sex can satiate the imbedded existential angst lurking within these trained killers. The hurry up and wait mentality of the armed forces only dials up this frustration. So, they are left to kill time, ceaselessly rehydrating and running in a weird, hostile barren land, a landscape reflective of their own desolated and circular psyches.

The book comes to a rather graphic head during the operations involving their follow up to the airforce?s air attacks. Surrounded by the charred and mutilated bodies of poorly trained Iraqi soldiers the marines clear the devastated lines and outposts of their enemy. One of Swofford?s comrades destabilises and begins repeatedly battering a corpse with blunt implements.

There are many counterpoints within as the stream of consciousness style meanders under and over his family?s relationship toward war and its effects, basic training, the various postings, the stories of friends and foes within the chore and his assorted girlfriends.

Yet, Swofford plunges deep and beyond all the infantilism and dysfunction until he seizes the thing he is after. The marine's heart is ripped out and exposed for what it truly is ? human. This makes a confronting and refreshing contrast to the dominant and insidiously self serving paradigm peddled by government and the military.

Once a jarhard - always a jarhead, is the most haunting insight. The living nightmare continues, far beyond any frontline action and well past the stamping of discharge papers. In a time poor society obsessed with disposability and instant gratification the ex-soldier realises that the process of reintegration is a perverse joke. And the true horror sets in, to be a Jarhead is a sentence, an everlasting curse.

For many Jarhead will be a hard pill to swallow, for others it will illuminate a vast shadowy darkness - a worthy read.

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