Jarhead

Writing

Swofford started writing the book in 1995. He stated about the writing process: "I had modest goals for my first book. I didn't think about sales numbers or a movie option or foreign rights and invitations to international book fairs. I didn't even know those things existed. Still heavily inhaling the fumes of pretension I'd earned at my MFA writing program, I wanted only to make art. I thought I possessed a number of unique and original insights about the making of young Marines and going to war and what combat does to a young psyche and soul. I thought that on most days I could manage to turn out a page or two of good sentences. I wrote the best book I could. I wanted my book to teach young people things about war I hadn't been taught or hadn't wanted to learn when I was a 17-year-old looking to escape a dull suburban life that felt like a prison."

Plot

Jarhead recounts Swofford's enlistment and service in the United States Marine Corps before and during the Persian Gulf War, in which he served as a Scout Sniper Trainee with the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon of 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines.

Like most of the troops stationed in the Middle East during the Gulf War, Swofford saw very little actual combat. Swofford's narrative focuses on the physical, mental, and emotional struggles of the young Marines.

One of the through lines of his first-person account involves the challenge of balancing the mind-set of the warrior with one's own basic sense of humanity. Swofford admits to a sense of disappointment, frustration and emptiness that comes in the wake of ultimately being cheated of any real combat experience by a war that, for many American Marines at least, ended all too quickly after enduring many months of tedious, anticlimactic suspense. Dead Iraqi soldiers littered the desert, many having been killed by airstrikes days or weeks before Swofford and the rest of the U.S. Marine Corps invaded Kuwait.

Banning

In May 2023, the Hudsonville, Michigan, school district removed the book from all of its school libraries. One supporter of the ban stated at a school board meeting: "We're here to fight against darkness. Jarhead has an extremely violent, vulgar, pornographic diatribe, and tonight, we will learn if HPS has any intention of taking any measures to protect our students from any flagrantly obscene content." An opponent of the ban stated: "We are allowing recruiters into schools where kids can sign on the dotted line, but they can't read about actual service members and soldiers experiences."

In an article about the banning of his book, Swofford wrote that most of the books banned in American schools have been by either black and/or gay authors and that: "As a straight, white male writer who has written almost exclusively about the military and warfare, I might have thought my books were safe." Swofford blamed the banning of Jarhead on "MAGA intrusionists" who objected to the book's frank depiction of the daily life of U.S. Marines. Swofford wrote that most of the objections to his book stemmed from the "field fuck" scene where Swofford and other Marines simulated gay sex while dressed in full protection gear from weapons of mass destruction in front of an assembled group of journalists in protest against their officers. Swofford wrote that the banning of his book felt "deeply un-American" and concluded: "Make no mistake, they are banning books, but really they are restricting access to ideas. And when one small group of people ban a larger group of people access to ideas, we are in for a closing of the American mind. What begins with banning books ends with a firescape of constitutional rights ablaze."

In 2023, the book was banned in Clay County District Schools, Florida.

Reception

A review for Kirkus Reviews in 2003 wrote: "Swofford’s debut covers all the bases: a stint in basic training with a brutal drill instructor, drunken episodes with prostitutes, fights with sailors, explosions and their attendant airborne body parts, postwar trauma and depression. Yet there’s not a clichéd moment in this rueful account of a Marine’s life, in which the hazards are many and the rewards few....Extraordinary: full of insight into the minds and rucksacks of our latter-day warriors". The reviewer noted that the book was not for the squeamish as Swofford recounted contracting dysentery during his time in the Middle East and how his fellow Marines mutilated the corpses of the Iraqi soldiers along the "Highway of Death". The British critic Aidan Hartley wrote in his review that Jarhead was an "excellent book" about the daily life of a "jarhead" (American slang for a Marine) that told the story of the Gulf War from the vantage point of a Marine serving on the ground.

In a negative review, Sam Williamson, a former Marine officer, wrote that he felt that Swofford had intentionally given an unfairly negative picture of life in the Marine Corps. Williamson felt that the title of Swofford's memoir was wrong-headed as the term "jarhead" is most commonly used by other branches of the U.S. military as derogatory slang for the Marines, through he noted that within the Marine Corps the term "jarhead" is often used as an affirmative slang term. Williamson felt that the picture of the all male Marine light infantry that Swoffford presented in his book as mindlessly sexist young men who made extensive use of the services of prostitutes while having troubled relationships with their wives or girlfriends was inaccurate. Williamson wrote: "Now, there's no question that when you take a group of twenty-something year old boys/men, there are going to be some legendary failures in their relationships with women. Every officer and NCO spends far too much of his time providing marital counseling to troubled twenty-year olds. These problems even led a former Commandant to propose that the Marine Corps cease accepting married recruits. But that said, I also saw young marriages that were incredibly strong, and left me in awe of the commitment that existed between people so young. These relationships rate less than a paragraph in Jarhead. Yet, in contrast, there are pages and pages describing the failures that existed between women and the Marines of STA platoon." Williamson felt that Swofford had focused too much on the "animalistic" side of Marine life with his tales of disgusting and/or salacious incidents, and not enough on the self-discipline needed to be a Marine. Williamson concluded that the Marine Corps is regarded as one of the premier branches of the American military, and that one would never know how this reputation was achieved from reading Jarhead.

Film adaptations

The novel was adapted into a 2005 feature film of the same name starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Peter Sarsgaard, and Lucas Black. The screenplay was written by William Broyles Jr. and the film directed by Sam Mendes. Reviews were generally positive. Jarhead 2: Field of Fire is the sequel to the 2005 film, followed by Jarhead 3: The Siege.