Jarhead

A new film, based on the author’s memoir, lays bare the emotional landscapes of war.

Photo: Adam Shemper

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Anthony Swofford was sent to the Saudi desert in 1990 with the U.S. Marines. He waited for six months in the sand and heat, battled boredom and fear, came close to suicide and almost murdered a fellow soldier. During four days of war, he survived enemy mortar attacks and friendly tank fire, and trekked into Iraq through a wasteland—left by U.S. warplanes—of bombed out vehicles and dead bodies. More than ten years after returning home and leaving the Marines, Swofford published Jarhead, a raw account of his time training and fighting with the Marines Corps. The memoir was released as the second Bush administration was preparing to return U.S. soldiers to Iraq, and became a national bestseller.

Jarhead is now a major motion picture. Like the book, the film delves deeply into the violence and brutality of life in the military and the psychological toll war takes on the soldier. Though the movie itself is not a protest against the current war in Iraq, it does add another voice, a soldier’s voice, to the discussion about how war ultimately affects those fighting.

Swofford now lives in New York, where he is working on a novel. Mother Jones recently spoke with him at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. Jarhead is out in theaters on November 4th.

Mother Jones: Tell me what you thought about the translation of the story from your book to the movie. What were your expectations?

Anthony Swofford: I had rather high expectations because of who was working on it. I was very careful about who I let touch the book. From very early on there was a lot of agreement me and Bill Broyles, the writer, and Sam Mendes, the producers, on how the book needed to be treated. And so, when I first saw the film, I thought it was great. I thought it was a real smart, artful adaptation, and it vividly portrayed the real emotional, philosophical, metaphysical heart of the book.

MJ: Did the way the movie depict war resonate with your own experience?

AS: I was testing the film on many levels the first time I saw it. I was testing it as the person whose life was being portrayed—this version of my life. But even more importantly for me, I was looking at it through my work, through my book. Because there’s so much distance between who I am now, and how I live my life, and who I was then, the filter of my work was more important than the filter of my personal history. I felt like the adaptation lived up to what I attempted to create, and that the war we see on screen is realistic. It’s also filmic, and it’s poetic, but war is also poeticized in my book, as it is by the Marine Corps. What Jarhead the film succeeds at, in a way that Jarhead the book did, is in spending a lot more time than many war films do in the psychological landscapes, the emotional landscapes, of warfare and of the fighter. We’ve seen the guy lose his leg, we’ve seen the guy with the sucking chest wound, we’ve seen the guy blinded by mortar fire. Do we need to see that again? I’m not sure we do.

MJ: What does war do to someone psychologically, and what did it do to you?

AS: It caused me not to trust people. I only trusted the guys I served with. I didn’t trust anyone else for many years. I was still in the Marine Corps for roughly 17 or 18 months after returning from war. So I still had that family I’d created, that we see created on screen. Once I was a civilian I had difficulty trusting people. I’d shared this thing with these guys, who I knew better than I felt like I’d ever know anybody in my life, and that was sort of troubling. I had trouble in relationships, in work relationships sometimes, in love relationships. It took me a while to normalize, and really realize those things that the Marine Corps had given me were important while I was a Marine, but not so important now that I was not. I had to debrief, and kind of had to do it on my own— and try to regain a part of me, the humanist me that had been lost.

MJ: In your book you were reading a lot. In the movie we see you reading Camus’ The Stranger. What did literature mean for you while you were in the military?

AS: Literature was for me the same thing it was in high school. I was a loner, and books were my escape. I found more interesting people in books, and I would have rather spent time with books than with people. And I was still a loner in the Marine Corps. My reading, and the kind of reading I was doing, sort of set me apart. Everybody is sort of weird for one thing or another, and that was the thing that made me weird. Chiefly it was this escape, again, this world that I could step into, this place where I had freedom. My mind was alive when I was reading. [There were] ways that my mind was alive like when I was on patrol, like when I was behind a sniper rifle—but those are anti-humanist ways of being alive. And my reading countered that.

MJ: What were you reading?

AS: I read Camus, I was rereading the Iliad, I was rereading The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth. I had Celine. I had The Myth of Sisyphus, which I finally cracked over there. I had tried to read it a few times before. I checked it out from the Marine Corps library in Okinawa. And it hadn’t been checked out since 1968 or something like that, so I was happy to pull it out of the stacks.

I would say, that most acts of warfare, most combat missions are Sisyphean. What is success? How do you complete the mission? And when do you complete the mission? And warriors who come home, they are never done with war; that boulder is always there, and they are always pushing it.

MJ: In Jarhead, you wrote about how you and the other marines used war movies as preparation—to get yourselves psyched up—just before you were deployed in the Saudi desert. “Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man…,” you wrote, and some of that porn was Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket? Do you imagine soldiers going over to Iraq now and watching Jarhead might have a similar response this movie?

AS: You know, I think, they could, the same way Marines read Jarhead before going over to war. I met a Marine last night at the University of Washington, who said, ‘Yeah, we had copies sent over from Amazon. We had it in the desert with us. We were reading it in Kuwait before we went over. And some guys still had it when we were there.’ My hope with the film Jarhead, is that it slows down that kind of violent action. There’s no “Lets Torch the Whole Fucking Village” moment, and there’s no, “I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning” moment. That’s something that makes Jarhead a different film from those other films.

MJ: I read in a past interview that you didn’t really watch much TV coverage of the most recent Iraq war, that you felt print was the best medium for delivering the experience of war.

AS: Feature film allows [for] narrative arc. It allows the development of character, conflict, tension, psychological tension, and that’s something that for the most part television news coverage doesn’t allow. Long form print allows more of that. I think the film does offer a vivid, authentic representation of the interior and the exterior of warfare and the young men doing the fighting.

MJ: Do you know anyone in the military who has seen the film?

AS: There are a few people who were with my unit in the Marine Corps who will be seeing the film shortly. Most of them have read the book.

MJ: And they see things the same way you do?

AS: Yes, for the most part. It’s a very personal experience. I tracked a few guys down before the book came out, because I wanted to confirm some events and they knew all of the stories just as I did, but I’m the one who chose to write them down. They told these stories in bars or to their buddies. And I’m the one who put them down on the page, that turned them into this, you know, something beyond just an oral story or a memory. Most of the guys respected that, and recognized their story, what was our story, the story of this platoon at war.

MJ: Do you know anyone serving in the current war?

AS: Well, I occasionally hear over email from Marines who are over there, some Army guys. I have a friend who is a Marine captain over in Iraq for the second time, who was supposed to get out of the Marine Corps and was going to start a journalism graduate program in September. In fact his resignation was stamped approved and he chose to stay in for another tour, because these young Marines that he trained—he’s a combat engineer—were about to deploy and go back to war and he felt like he had a duty to them and to the Marine Corps.

MJ: What are some of the stories he’s been telling you? Are they similar to experiences you had when you were there?

AS: This war is different in many ways. They’ve been there longer. The threats are different. You know, my friend came home, and he called me driving down the 405 in San Diego, and he’s driving in his Audi looking for roadside bombs. So, I think the combatant is always burdened with returning and making his way through his past. And that we as citizens have a responsibility to those guys upon return. We have to make some kind of an attempt to understand what their life is like.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate