Rating: 
Summary: excellent memoir of the first Gulf War...
Review: With the second Gulf War coming to a close (presumably), this is a popular time to be reading books about the first Gulf War as they may have some bearing on the current one and to help us understand what might really be happening on the ground. Jarhead is a memoir of the first Gulf War written by Anthony Swofford, a marine sniper who was in Kuwait and Iraq for Operation Desert Shield/Storm. This is his story of the Marines, and his experiences in the first Gulf War. Swofford tells a story of one man's disillusionment with the Marine Corp and while he tries to spin the story so that we believe this is the entire Corps; that is a hard story to take. Swofford's Marine Corps is a bunch of men who do not want to be there and would love nothing more than to go home again. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of Swofford's experiences, but the author also admits to being a little unstable throughout his tour of duty. It is Swofford's depression (which he mentions several times) and disillusionment with the military and war that shapes and colors his narrative. As he weaves his story, the author presents his view of war. By the end of the book, Swofford is telling us that war is wrong and unnecessary. I thought this was a well written (if profane) book about the first Gulf War (and war in general), however Anthony Swofford's views on that particular war (that it was fought for oil) colors his account. He presents the idea that war is bad, but does not acknowledge the necessity of it at times, nor does Swofford present a reasonable alternative to war. Even so, Jarhead is well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Disgruntled Marine
Review: When a friend of mine first gave me this book I was very excited. I belonged to 1/7 the authors sister battalion and a member of task force Ripper in the Gulf War. I thought the book would describe areas of operations or individuals that I might have known. At the very least I thought based on the title "jarhead" the book would be a sort of factual depiction of U.S. Marines. Instead what I read was the works of a person who hated the Marine Corps and if he did, his reasons are his own. Based on the way he seems to "whine" about everything makes me wonder if the author was even a member of a S.T.A platoon at all. His writing style seems to reflect that the author attended a class on metaphors and then went wild trying to "flower up" the language or make the book longer by trying to fill the pages with non relevant language. His use of common Marine terminology runs rampid through out the book as if Marines actually run around speaking that way all of the time and calling each other jarhead at every turn. The author filled the pages with his own personal feelings which would have been great if they were relevant to the subject matter and not because he was upset that people were unfaithful to their spouses while deployed. I wonder if these feelings are from his personal experiences and felt the need to vent. I do not recommend this book to anyone who has any knowledge of military life because I believe they would just be dissapointed. I do recommend this book to people who have absolutely no idea of what military life is like, likes a short story with tons of "filler or Flowery" language and a couple of hours to kill while stranded in a remote location with no access to anything else to pass the time.
I was very dissapointed in this book because other then a few accounts it does not reflect the true nature of what makes a U.S. Marine act, behave or feel the way they do in a combat zone. It is the work of a bitter person. To use the words of the Drill Instructor in the film "Full Metal Jacket". "YOUR A KILLER SWOFFARD, NOT A WRITER"! At least not a very good or honest one.
Rating:
Summary: He's Not a Jarhead, He's a Knucklehead
Review: I found Swofford's book to be an astonishingly dismal and disappointing literary swamp, infested with fleas, vipers, muck and nothing resembling the Marine Corps in which I served. Based on the kindly professional reviewers comments, you would think this was a good read. Not so. I'm not sure exactly what they were reading or if it's overblown prose and overdramatic content made for nice chat at some Manhattan cocktail party or what? I saw Swofford on Conan O'Brien and Fox commenting on his book and the Iraqi War. He looked unhappy and uncomfortable with himself. Based on the book, he should be.
Rating:
Summary: don't believe the hype
Review: What disappointed me almost more than this book is the glowing reviews people are heaping on it, as if this book is revealing some Big Secret about war that we didn't already know. War is mostly sitting around but sometimes real scary and dead people smell bad. Young "warriors" drink a lot and cuss and screw around and act like 13 year old jocks in a junior high locker room. None of this should be a surprise to anyone with any life experience at all. All I got from this book was that the author is an unhappy person with an unhappy childhood and poor family life, with no real friends, no normal relationships with the opposite sex, and that he seems to have the most minimal set of moral values or beliefs. Based on my own experiences everywhere from DC briefing rooms to U.S. bases in Persian Gulf countries under Threatcon Delta, he's not representative of those who serve. Would you let the author babysit your children? Or serve as a cop patrolling your neighborhood? As Dogbert once wrote: "I wouldn't trust him with string." I'd suggest as an alternative "On Killing" by Lt. Col David Grossman, a West Point psychology prof and Army Ranger. It offers much more intelligent discussion of how warriors must deal with releasing and controlling the raw animal behavior necessary to be effective war-fighters without turning out like the author.
Rating: 
Summary: UNFAITHFUL
Review: I read some wonderful reviews on this book and bought it with the intention of shipping it to an active-duty Marine in Iraq. Good thing I glanced through this before I sent it off. I have since returned it and am looking for something else to send. The book is very well written and entertaining, but aside from the deceptively smooth prose and rampant humor, it might be considered an insult to anyone who is actually proud of the Corps. Most of Swofford's self description and description of fellow Marines reduce them to reckless, cheating, drunken brutes with little sense of honor for the "traditions." What my boyfriend would call "the bad seeds." Now granted the stuff he mentioned does happen, and that there is this type of Marine out there, the healthier type of Marine is almost completely absent here. I guess it wouldn't be fun to write about the guy just doing his job with minimal drama. You know, the true Semper Fi guy who actually has morals and believes in the cause. So, while I won't refute those who extols the writer's stark honesty in relating his personal feelings of what it was like to be a Marine, I'd advice anyone reading this to keep in mind that it is what it says: ONE Marine's chronicle... So in conclusion, I give this a 4-5 on merits of craftmanship and 1-2 on representation of modern US Marines in totality.
Rating:
Summary: Cool voice
Review: What an amazing read. Swafford turned his head inside-out and spilled his thoughts out onto paper. The force, the brutality, the fear, the violence, and sex oozing from his prose is astounding. It's entrancing. It's a grim song, a poem of death, of youth, of the United States. "Jarhead" contains the contradictions of America. The noble, peaceful ideals of our country and its sometime violent application of force. The reality of the American Dream, but the gut strength and force required to achieve it. The worship of youth and its beauty, and the degradation of mind and body through drink, drugs, and sex. Here's a boy who joins up for both selfish and noble reasons, who finds a crazy, brutal, horrific place, which he eventually comes to love for the humanity he found in its terror. Is this what it's like to serve as a marine? Only a marine can tell you. But it feels honest. Swafford cuts through fluff, shears away illusion, and tries to deal fairly with his past. He shares his experiences by sucking you into his brain with his voice. It's eerie. Creepy. Startlingly effective. The book's main flaw is also a symptom of Swafford's character. In it, Swafford is unable to sum up his feelings. He tries to at the end of the book in a few choppy sections - conveying a sense of confusion - he gives us a few garbled summations of his feelings, but...it didn't work for me. Some reviewers took his book to be an anti-war tract. I'm not so sure about that. But I would like to know. What has he learned? The confusion at the end seems to say that Swafford hasn't figured it out yet.
Rating: 
Summary: A Jarhead...Yes... but not a Marine.
Review: Having spent ten years in the Marine Corps myself, it was nice to read about some of my old stomping grounds; Camp Pendleton, Subic Bay, Camp Hanson, Kinville, among many others. Swoffard's got the Jarhead lingo down pat, however, his accounts of the two day ground war that he was a part of, in no way allows him to be compared to Webb, Caputo or any of the other "real" combat veterans that have written of their experiences. Swoffard never fired a round in combat, yet spends much of the book bitching about how tough he had it, and how much he hated the Marine Corps. And all these tales about girlfriends... give me a break. I saw this fat little toad on Conan OBrien. He looked like Buddy Hacket with a bad haircut. Also, his stories of physical abuse by a drill instructor are more fantasies to foster the Marine Corps mystique and help sell this book. As a drill instructor in Parris Island, I met many "boys" like Swoffard that joined the Marine Corps to try and prove something to themselves or perhaps to impress their family and friends. His tale is like so many other generation X crybabies. Sorry Jarhead... I was not impressed.
Rating:
Summary: Haven't I read this somewhere before?
Review: Swofford may have set out to write a compelling and haunting tale of USMC life, love and combat, but the result is a tired, recycled version of a classic coming-of-age story. Boy, young and naive, meets archetypal characters in his youth that foreshadow the events to come in his life; boy, still naive, joines the Marines; boy realizes that gee, the Marines are a lot less glamorous than he expected; boy sleeps with many beautiful and exotic women; boy has life-altering experience (in this case, combat); boy expresses his newfound wisdom by growing his hair long and sleeping with more beautiful, exotic women. I wanted to like Jarhead. I really did. But Swofford's reach for symbolism and metaphor often exceeds his grasp. I highly doubt that Swofford's after-the-fact analysis of his actions is all that accurate (I wasn't just f*****g that girl at the bar; I was f*****g the world, he writes). Additionally, the "shocking expose" of life in the Marine Corps is not exactly shocking. You mean a group of 20 or 30 18-to-25 year olds enjoy drinking, swearing, firing guns, having sex and watching pornography? You mean that young men who marry young women they met in bars or other similarly seed places cheat on their wives, and their wives cheat on them? You mean there's more to the USMC than fancy uniforms and hoo-ah? I used to think that I would write the Great American Novel about my high school experiences, but as I read my manuscript a few years later, I realized that the story was neither engaging nor shocking to anyone but me, the 15-year-old who had had the experiences. I had the decency to stop subjecting the world to my adolescent highs and lows. Swofford, unfortuantely, hasn't learned that lesson yet, and as he markets Jarhead to an older, wiser audience, I hope he's not around to hear the chuckles.
Rating:
Summary: A Marine's Training & Deployment
Review: The author provides an insight into the training and deployment experiences of a Marine "sniper". He depicts real-life, day-to-day activities in the military, including the mundane as well as the exciting. If you are interested in an overview of a young Marine's military experiences, you may enjoy this book, however, I suggest you review "With The Old Breed" by Eugene B. Sledge as you may find it far more compelling. I have the utmost regard for our young men in the Armed Services, however, I confess that I lost my admiration for the author, early in the book, when he admits stealing from his fellow soldiers to secure "drinking" money.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written but somewhat underwhelming
Review: Anthony Swofford's memoir of Gulf War One is an intermittently thrilling read, reminiscent at times of some of the great writing to come out of the Vietnam War: Tim O' Brien's "The Things They Carried" and John Ketwig's "...and a hard rain fell" come most immediately to mind, though I hesitate to classify
"Jarhead" as a great book. Swofford's biggest strength lies within his descriptions, particularly of the dense clouds of smoke from the torched Kuwaiti oil fields that seem a permanent fixture on the horizon. The reader is able to feel, smell, and even taste the desert sand, the relentless heat, the decomposed corpses of Iraqi soldiers... But for all this, I found Swofford's narrative somewhat lacking. I was expecting to be moved by his experiences and his reflections upon the morality of wartime. Instead I found myself turning pages quickly but with very little actual contemplation over what I was reading. And by the time the war ends and Swofford is on his journey home, I realized that I, as the reader, was underwhelmed at least in comparison to other books I've read of this genre. Still, Swofford is a fine writer and I look forward to reading his next book. And I give "Jarhead" a recommendation because it does capture its setting and scene and introduces the literary world to an emerging new talent.
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