Jarhead by Anthony Swofford

Author:Anthony Swofford [Swofford, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, Persian Gulf War (1991), General
ISBN: 9780743239189
Google: 9bvnfRCN424C
Amazon: 0743239180
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2003-07-14T12:00:00+00:00

By early December the weather has cooled considerably; the high temperature hasn’t hit eighty in over a month, the mornings are wet with a heavy dew, and occasionally a light rain lingers through the day.

In America the antiwar movement gains momentum. My friend Jenn sends me articles opposing the buildup in Saudi Arabia and what looks to most observers to be inevitable offensive operations. The articles generally link the Gulf conflict with U.S. energy and economic policies that rely heavily on fossil fuels and the defense of low prices for those fuels. But we marines of STA do not care about fuel, we care about living and shooting.

Heavy-equipment operators from the Combat Engineers have built a rifle range in the middle of the Triangle. With their Caterpillars they gouged the shooting berm from the belly of the desert, one thousand yards from firing berm to target, each fire avenue demarcated by the tracks of the big diesel machines.

Below the sand of the Arabian Desert is, quite simply, more sand. We’ve dug fighting holes, but the Caterpillars have reached much deeper. I don’t know what I expected to see, perhaps bedrock, which certainly exists at some level, but the blades of the tractors have not gone far enough, and this disturbs me. Sand—we can’t get away from it, and if we die and are abandoned, we’ll be buried in a sand casket.

We acquire one thousand rounds of match-quality ammunition (match quality meaning that the ballistics of the projectiles are up to competition standards), the famous boat-tail round, the most precise, most severe round fired from our rifle, the round the rifle was made for, the round that was made for the rifle. The school-trained snipers wear a hog’s tooth—slang for the boat-tail projectile—around their neck, and the rest of us tape our hog’s tooth to our dog tags or carry one in our left breast pocket. I stow mine in my pocket, and just as old punished philosophers and characters from fiction have done with stones, I often take my hog’s tooth into my mouth and suck on it. The taste is of the earth and I recognize the sweat and labor of the first rifleman, wherever he stood and fought and crawled and died on whatever battlefield, for whatever sorry cause. The warrior always fights for a sorry cause. And if he lives, he tells stories.

At the long-distance range, Crocket and I use duct tape to attach targets to the hulks of bombed and shot-up vehicles. It looks like a quarter acre of junkyard has been shipped to the Desert.

The platoon shoots for an hour, and after pulling the targets a few times and confirming that we’re consistently hitting in the bull, we stop bothering with the targets and simply fire away. Just as the point guard knows the instant the ball leaves his hands whether the shot will become a basket or a brick, the sniper knows as soon as he pulls the trigger whether the shot will become a kill or a miss.

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