Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
Anthony Swofford

June 7, 2003

The Evil That Men Do

To read the negative, even vicious "citizen reviews" on amazon.com of Swofford’s new book—and there are many—is to come face to face with the grotesque, degenerate foundation of American “patriotism”: All information that fails to fit the received (and brutally enforced) “truth” must be a lie, a distortion, a plea for sympathy, the product of diseased consciousness, an embellishment—all of which are phrases that some of the 116 (to date) reviewers have used to describe Swofford’s memoir.

The minds that plan and carry out wars, and the sad masses that swallow their propaganda, cannot permit themselves a complex thought; all moral questions must be reduced to binaries; and, thus, if something is not entirely true, it must be entirely false.

Even supposing, for the sake of argument, that Swofford’s account contains some “literary” enhancements or even that he wholly fabricated some scenes (neither of which I believe), the ring of truth is sufficient in his book to give pause to any reader who has somehow managed to maintain a permeable mind despite the brain rinse that American mediaculture attempts to force on every citizen.

What Swofford says about being a man—and about the military’s vast effort to conflate being a “killer” with successful masculinity, which is, in turn, spuriously connected to “real” Americanism—is true knowledge that any man who grew up in this country knows natively.

What he says about the process of trying to make eighteen-year-olds believe, as our government did in Gulf War I, that their service was meant to “protect” democracy is heartbreaking—and is supported by decades of war literature written by other men & women who were also “there.” If Swofford is lying, so are Tim O’Brien, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Herr, Harold Moore, Robert Peterson, Erich Remarque, Lynda Van Devanter, Ron Kovic, Tim Barrus, Alan Cornett, Dan Hallock, Larry Heinemann, Charles Nelson, Philip Caputo, Bernard Fall, John Laurence, Frederick Downs, Mark Bowden … the list goes on and on.

But Swofford’s detractors would insist that they must all be liars, too. Just as anyone must be a liar who sees the folly in the US government’s sixty-year-old policy of trying to bomb the world into obedience.

I cannot help but wonder why so many who describe themselves as veterans in their reviews would expose Swofford to the cruelest of all responses to the returning soldier: “I don’t believe you.”

I wonder, too, why there is so much concern among amazon’s reviewers about Swofford’s honesty, when it is indisputable that honesty is a word unknown to those who plan and execute (but never fight in) wars, most particularly the one in which our country is currently engaged.

Though I wish there were no marines in Iraq today, if they must be there, I hope there is an Anthony Swofford among them. Someone has to tell us a way through the propaganda; someone has to live to remind us that waging war in the pursuit of peace leaves in its wake only victims, never victors.