Anthony Swofford. Jarhead: a Marine's Commentary of the Gulf War.

Simon and Schuster, London, 2003. ISBN 0-7432-4820-1. pbk, 260 pages, 13 x 21 cm. $26.95.

War indeed is a terrible business. Sometimes necessary, but always damaging--damaging to the conquered, the innocent civilians caught up in something not of their making and damaging to the grunts or infantry on the ground who are the primary witnesses to the devastation. The author was a teenager with a troubled background who joined the USMC at 17 1/2 and as a twenty-year-old Marine ended up in Sandi Arabia and Kuwait as part of the forces involved in Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

There have been few books to come out about Gulf War 1 and this one, for adults only, fills a void with story telling talent. It provides invaluable insights into the brutalising boot camp system for Marine recruits, the dissolute lifestyle of soldiers trained (or perhaps overtrained) for combat, the arduous lifestyle and training regime for seven months in the Saudi desert and the anticlimax of a war all but over before the Marine infantry can prove their mettle.

One can readily understand the author's desire upon discharge to put his military service behind him, but we are indebted to him for eventually addressing the subject and preserving for posterity his experiences, his emotions and his sentiments of war. Perhaps the final clincher should go to Abraham Lincoln in his 1848 Speech against the War with Mexico: "Military glory--that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy".