Views > November 16, 2005 > Web Only
When Boys Will be Jarheads (cont’d)
Political commentary aside, Mendes’ greatest failure is that he is either unwilling or unable to capture the true genius of Jarhead, which lies not in its exposition of war but of its combatants. Swofford’s memoir is singular in revealing the peculiar mixture of self-loathing, anger and confusion that lies beneath the posturing machismo of military life:
Like most good and great marines, I hated the Corps. I hated being a marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be—smart, famous, sexy, oversexed, drunk, fucked, high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy—more than all of those things, I was a marine. A jarhead. A grunt.
But—contrary to what some antiwar activists may want to believe—it is not the process of becoming a jarhead that creates this sense of malaise, but rather it is the very disease that spurs them to become a Marine. Swofford’s desire to become a Marine is “based on my intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood.” So when his father rebuffs his first attempt to sign up, the seventeen-year old is devastated:
In a matter of seconds my entire life plan had been altered. I wept. What would I do with myself? I’d already, in my heart, signed the contract and accepted the warrior lifestyle. I wanted to be a killer, to kill my country’s enemies. Now I’d have to take the SATs and visit colleges. I’d have to find a part-time job. I’d never live abroad and chase prostitutes through the world’s brothels, or Communists through the world’s jungles. I needed the Marine Corps now, I needed the Marine Corps to save me from the other life I’d fail at—the life of a college boy hoping to find a girlfriend and later a job.
Our society offers young men only two badges of masculine success: money or violence, or preferably—as the title of 50 Cent’s new movie Get Rich or Die Tryin’ suggests—some combination of both. No wonder then that a young man with limited prospects would seek a shortcut to manhood in the military. It becomes almost inevitable when even failing in college isn’t one of the options on the table.
In its Summer 2005 issue, Radar magazine profiled the men of the 506th Infantry—the same regiment that became the legendary “Band of Brothers” during World War II—now stationed in the heart of Sunni Triangle. Only one among them has a college degree, and it’s not nineteen-year old David Nash, who explains that the war is no more violent than the place he calls home:
My best friend back home just shot himself. Three days ago. Now I only got one friend left at home who isn’t dead or in prison. Just one. Fuck that. … There’s nothing hard about the army. It ain’t even that dangerous for a lot of us, compared to home. It’s not even uncomfortable. You should see where half the people in this platoon grew up. Or fuckin’ prison. I’ve seen bad things in Iraq, but I seen bad shit at home, too. One of my friends, we were in a car at a red light and four dudes stopped and lit us up. That was okay: Back home I could get revenge. Here I can’t do nothing about it when my friends get blown up. After they shot my friend at the traffic light we went to their neighborhood, some ghetto-ass neighborhood, and took them all out. I killed two of them myself, shot ‘em dead.
The antiwar left’s well-founded argument about the connection between class and military recruiting does not acknowledge the other, equally compelling reason why young men sucuumb to the military’s allure. These boys enlist for the same reason their peers join street gangs: for the heady cocktail of violence, intense camraderie and sexual aggression that makes them feel like a man. From a poor inner city kid’s point of view, there isn’t that much difference between becoming a jarhead or a gang member; it’s a matter of ducking bullets in the Sunni Triangle or in your backyard. More importantly, fighting in Iraq may actually be the safer option.
Like far too many Hollywood directors before him, Mendes refuses to face the immense complexity of war and the men who fight them. Jarhead the book asks that we accept that all wars—good or bad—are brutal and loathsome. That the young men we send into battle will often behave badly irrespective of the reasons for invading Iraq or any other country.
In rewriting Swofford’s memoir as a “coming of age” story, Mendes instead reiterates the Hollywood fantasy of war as a male rite of passage. The intimate relationship between masculinity and violence runs deep in our culture, and war is merely one of its many manifestations. There is nothing more dangerous than an insecure nineteen-year old with a gun, be it on the battlefield or the streets of Oakland. The more important question then is whether we can imagine a world that offers him a different path to manhood.
More information about Lakshmi Chaudhry
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