thedrifter
01-08-07, 06:41 AM
Different war, different story
Posted 1/7/2007 9:27 PM ET
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — The Marine Corps' high-and-tight haircut that gave Anthony Swofford the title of his best-selling memoir, Jarhead, is long gone. His look now is gelled and spiky, with a beard and untucked shirt.
Jarhead, a grunt's iconoclastic memoir of the Gulf War, was a best seller in 2003 even before the 2005 movie, in which Jake Gyllenhaal played Swofford. It prompted magazines to ask Swofford to go to Iraq as a reporter. The former Marine sniper declined.
"I didn't want to go into a war zone with a pen and paper," Swofford says over lunch in Manhattan, where he lives. "I didn't want to go into a war zone at all."
It's not a sense of been-there, done-that. Swofford knows that Iraq, which he calls a "colossal debacle," is more complex than his brief combat in 1991, which ended in the sands of Kuwait amid burnt Iraqi corpses.
But rather than report on a new war, he had a novel to write about the aftermath of an old war. Fiction remains his first and enduring love — even if the critical and commercial success of Jarhead remains a hard act to follow.
Swofford's debut novel, Exit A (Scribner, $25), will be published Tuesday. It's a dark love story about two military dependents. It begins at and around a U.S. Air Force base in Japan at the end of the Cold War.
It deals with the aftermath of Vietnam and what Swofford calls the "domestic victims" of any war: the children and spouses of soldiers. And it's about the messy cultural collision between a foreign country and the muscular U.S. military, which Swofford sees as an "American subculture."
That kind of collision, he says, "seems important at this moment" because of the war in Iraq. "It's an undertold story, at least in literature." Military life, he says, is "rather foreign in New York or San Francisco literary circles."
At 36, Swofford looks and sounds more like a professor (he has taught writing at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.) than the gung-ho Marine he once was. He's polite and reserved, with no trace of the profanities that litter his memoir.
He says he wanted his novel to be different. Jarhead "was very male, very profane and quite violent." He wanted "something softer, more of the domestic side of the world that I knew so well as the son of a military man."
The genesis of a writer
A war baby, Swofford was conceived in the Honolulu Hilton while his father was on his first R&R leave from the Vietnam War.
He grew up on Air Force bases in Japan, California and Ohio, and says he became a loner who made "sense of the world through books." At 14, he read and loved John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, about misfits in Monterey, Calif.
When his family visited the actual Cannery Row, he was disappointed. It had been made safe for tourists: "It sold cotton candy. The book was much more vivid, interesting and dangerous." He started dreaming of becoming a writer.
But first came the Marines. Swofford enlisted at 18. As he writes in Jarhead, a recruiter gleefully reminisced about prostitutes in foreign lands and assured him, "You'll be a fine killer."
He went to war with an M-16 rifle and copies of Homer's The Iliad and Camus' The Stranger. After four years and a promotion to corporal, he was ready to move on, forget the war, go to college and become a writer.
A memoir was not in his plans, but "content dictates form." At 30, after studying at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, he started Jarhead to help understand the 20-year-old he had been, the soldier who considered himself "less of a Marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat."
Swofford was nearly killed, both by the enemy and friendly fire. As a sniper, he had Iraqis in his rifle sights but was called off by a captain. At the time, Swofford was angry and resentful. Now he's thankful. He says he doesn't regret joining the Marines or leaving. "Without that, I'd be a different writer. I'm not sure how, but different." He's more at ease talking about his writing than himself.
Asked whether he has a tattoo, which figures in the plot of his novel, he smiles and says, "I can't answer that." He's divorced, like one of his main characters, and he says the experience influenced his novel, but he doesn't go into details.
Exit A (the title comes from a subway stop on the way to Tokyo) is not autobiographical, he says, except in an "emotional" and "spiritual" sense, "but that can be said of any novel."
The rebellious and beautiful girl in his novel, named Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, is a hafu, half-American, half-Japanese. Her father is a general; her mother died during childbirth. Her Japanese middle name means "happy child," which she is not. It's also the name of Swofford's college girlfriend, Sachiko Tamura. They remain friends and she helped with his research, but mostly, he says, "I made it up."
He prefers to write fiction: "In a memoir, you know the beginning and end of the story you've chosen to tell. With a novel it's a much blanker page. You try to think like a 17-year-old girl who's half-Japanese, half-American, or a 50-year-old general, and make it vivid. A novelist has much more freedom."
The idea for the novel began with a family photo taken at an Air Force base in Japan about 30 years ago. It shows the Swoffords on their manicured front lawn, winners of the base's "yard of the year" award.
"It looks so domestic, and yet I knew that the story was so much bigger and complicated," he says. "Not far from that lawn there were weapons and planes," ready, as his novel puts it, to "strike North Korea with a rain of bombs."
That base has been closed and turned into a peace park. "It's lovely," Swofford says. "Some would say it's antithetical to everything that's military. Some would say peace is the aim of the military."
To him, it's not an either/or: "The road to peace through use of the military is bloody and corpse-filled and takes a long, long while."
Swofford says it's not in his nature to be a political activist, "but if asked, I comment."
In 2003, when Jarhead was published just as the war in Iraq began, he warned, "The most problematic times will come after combat." Now, he says, "there's a lot of blame to go around," including the U.S. generals who failed to publicly voice misgivings until after they retired.
"I am not a strategist," he says, and he hopes that "this is not Vietnam, for the sake of the country and the military." He says that "something may be salvageable. Victory is not the word. Maybe some level of repair can be done to Iraqi society."
He laments that most of the 3,000 and counting U.S. war dead are "poor kids," the products of a "ghettoized military." But he sees no sign of a return to the draft: "The generals don't want angry kids who've been ripped out of college. They want kids like I was, who at 14 (after a suicide bomber killed 220 Marines in Lebanon) had my mother iron a Marine insignia on my T-shirt."
Right place, right time
The Iraq war boosted interest in Jarhead, which critics ranked with Vietnam classics such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Michael Herr's Dispatches. But had it been published in 2000, he says, "more people would have been worried about the dot-com bust. I was fortunate to become part of a national discussion."
The 2005 movie also boosted book sales (900,000 copies in print, including movie tie-in paperbacks). Swofford remembers his first screening and "how bizarre it was to see this character up on the screen being called Swofford … but soon I was watching it as a writer to see what they had done to my book." He enthusiastically approved.
He'd love to see Exit A become a movie. He may try to write the screenplay and even imagines the casting (Sean Penn as the troubled general) but for now is in the grip of writing another novel.
It, too, has a military backdrop, about two brothers: a successful artist in New York and a Marine officer just back from Iraq. (Swofford's brother, Jeff, died in 1998 of lymphoma at 35 after 12 years in the Army.)
As for his post-Jarhead second act, Swofford knows Exit A will attract more attention and higher expectations because of his memoir. But when it came to the writing, "It was just me, alone in a room. That doesn't change."
The pre-publication reviews have been respectful but mixed.
Kirkus calls it "a well-rounded tale (that) will surprise readers of Swofford's tough-as-nails memoir." But Booklist says "Swofford is much better at rending unfamiliar worlds (military bases, criminal life) than familiar ones (college campuses, relationships)."
His editor, Colin Harrison, a novelist himself who also worked on Jarhead, says, "If people expect Jarhead Redux, that would be unfortunate. This is a novel doing its own thing and should be judged on its own terms and own merits."
Swofford recalls a joint appearance in Portland, Ore., with Barry Lopez, the acclaimed nature writer. Lopez has written 17 books, but is remembered by many for 1978's Of Wolves and Men, and is often asked, "Aren't you the wolf guy?"
Lopez advised Swofford that when he's asked, "Aren't you the Jarhead guy?" to "smile, say yes, then add, 'But I have this new book out …' "
Ellie
Posted 1/7/2007 9:27 PM ET
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — The Marine Corps' high-and-tight haircut that gave Anthony Swofford the title of his best-selling memoir, Jarhead, is long gone. His look now is gelled and spiky, with a beard and untucked shirt.
Jarhead, a grunt's iconoclastic memoir of the Gulf War, was a best seller in 2003 even before the 2005 movie, in which Jake Gyllenhaal played Swofford. It prompted magazines to ask Swofford to go to Iraq as a reporter. The former Marine sniper declined.
"I didn't want to go into a war zone with a pen and paper," Swofford says over lunch in Manhattan, where he lives. "I didn't want to go into a war zone at all."
It's not a sense of been-there, done-that. Swofford knows that Iraq, which he calls a "colossal debacle," is more complex than his brief combat in 1991, which ended in the sands of Kuwait amid burnt Iraqi corpses.
But rather than report on a new war, he had a novel to write about the aftermath of an old war. Fiction remains his first and enduring love — even if the critical and commercial success of Jarhead remains a hard act to follow.
Swofford's debut novel, Exit A (Scribner, $25), will be published Tuesday. It's a dark love story about two military dependents. It begins at and around a U.S. Air Force base in Japan at the end of the Cold War.
It deals with the aftermath of Vietnam and what Swofford calls the "domestic victims" of any war: the children and spouses of soldiers. And it's about the messy cultural collision between a foreign country and the muscular U.S. military, which Swofford sees as an "American subculture."
That kind of collision, he says, "seems important at this moment" because of the war in Iraq. "It's an undertold story, at least in literature." Military life, he says, is "rather foreign in New York or San Francisco literary circles."
At 36, Swofford looks and sounds more like a professor (he has taught writing at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.) than the gung-ho Marine he once was. He's polite and reserved, with no trace of the profanities that litter his memoir.
He says he wanted his novel to be different. Jarhead "was very male, very profane and quite violent." He wanted "something softer, more of the domestic side of the world that I knew so well as the son of a military man."
The genesis of a writer
A war baby, Swofford was conceived in the Honolulu Hilton while his father was on his first R&R leave from the Vietnam War.
He grew up on Air Force bases in Japan, California and Ohio, and says he became a loner who made "sense of the world through books." At 14, he read and loved John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, about misfits in Monterey, Calif.
When his family visited the actual Cannery Row, he was disappointed. It had been made safe for tourists: "It sold cotton candy. The book was much more vivid, interesting and dangerous." He started dreaming of becoming a writer.
But first came the Marines. Swofford enlisted at 18. As he writes in Jarhead, a recruiter gleefully reminisced about prostitutes in foreign lands and assured him, "You'll be a fine killer."
He went to war with an M-16 rifle and copies of Homer's The Iliad and Camus' The Stranger. After four years and a promotion to corporal, he was ready to move on, forget the war, go to college and become a writer.
A memoir was not in his plans, but "content dictates form." At 30, after studying at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, he started Jarhead to help understand the 20-year-old he had been, the soldier who considered himself "less of a Marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat."
Swofford was nearly killed, both by the enemy and friendly fire. As a sniper, he had Iraqis in his rifle sights but was called off by a captain. At the time, Swofford was angry and resentful. Now he's thankful. He says he doesn't regret joining the Marines or leaving. "Without that, I'd be a different writer. I'm not sure how, but different." He's more at ease talking about his writing than himself.
Asked whether he has a tattoo, which figures in the plot of his novel, he smiles and says, "I can't answer that." He's divorced, like one of his main characters, and he says the experience influenced his novel, but he doesn't go into details.
Exit A (the title comes from a subway stop on the way to Tokyo) is not autobiographical, he says, except in an "emotional" and "spiritual" sense, "but that can be said of any novel."
The rebellious and beautiful girl in his novel, named Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, is a hafu, half-American, half-Japanese. Her father is a general; her mother died during childbirth. Her Japanese middle name means "happy child," which she is not. It's also the name of Swofford's college girlfriend, Sachiko Tamura. They remain friends and she helped with his research, but mostly, he says, "I made it up."
He prefers to write fiction: "In a memoir, you know the beginning and end of the story you've chosen to tell. With a novel it's a much blanker page. You try to think like a 17-year-old girl who's half-Japanese, half-American, or a 50-year-old general, and make it vivid. A novelist has much more freedom."
The idea for the novel began with a family photo taken at an Air Force base in Japan about 30 years ago. It shows the Swoffords on their manicured front lawn, winners of the base's "yard of the year" award.
"It looks so domestic, and yet I knew that the story was so much bigger and complicated," he says. "Not far from that lawn there were weapons and planes," ready, as his novel puts it, to "strike North Korea with a rain of bombs."
That base has been closed and turned into a peace park. "It's lovely," Swofford says. "Some would say it's antithetical to everything that's military. Some would say peace is the aim of the military."
To him, it's not an either/or: "The road to peace through use of the military is bloody and corpse-filled and takes a long, long while."
Swofford says it's not in his nature to be a political activist, "but if asked, I comment."
In 2003, when Jarhead was published just as the war in Iraq began, he warned, "The most problematic times will come after combat." Now, he says, "there's a lot of blame to go around," including the U.S. generals who failed to publicly voice misgivings until after they retired.
"I am not a strategist," he says, and he hopes that "this is not Vietnam, for the sake of the country and the military." He says that "something may be salvageable. Victory is not the word. Maybe some level of repair can be done to Iraqi society."
He laments that most of the 3,000 and counting U.S. war dead are "poor kids," the products of a "ghettoized military." But he sees no sign of a return to the draft: "The generals don't want angry kids who've been ripped out of college. They want kids like I was, who at 14 (after a suicide bomber killed 220 Marines in Lebanon) had my mother iron a Marine insignia on my T-shirt."
Right place, right time
The Iraq war boosted interest in Jarhead, which critics ranked with Vietnam classics such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Michael Herr's Dispatches. But had it been published in 2000, he says, "more people would have been worried about the dot-com bust. I was fortunate to become part of a national discussion."
The 2005 movie also boosted book sales (900,000 copies in print, including movie tie-in paperbacks). Swofford remembers his first screening and "how bizarre it was to see this character up on the screen being called Swofford … but soon I was watching it as a writer to see what they had done to my book." He enthusiastically approved.
He'd love to see Exit A become a movie. He may try to write the screenplay and even imagines the casting (Sean Penn as the troubled general) but for now is in the grip of writing another novel.
It, too, has a military backdrop, about two brothers: a successful artist in New York and a Marine officer just back from Iraq. (Swofford's brother, Jeff, died in 1998 of lymphoma at 35 after 12 years in the Army.)
As for his post-Jarhead second act, Swofford knows Exit A will attract more attention and higher expectations because of his memoir. But when it came to the writing, "It was just me, alone in a room. That doesn't change."
The pre-publication reviews have been respectful but mixed.
Kirkus calls it "a well-rounded tale (that) will surprise readers of Swofford's tough-as-nails memoir." But Booklist says "Swofford is much better at rending unfamiliar worlds (military bases, criminal life) than familiar ones (college campuses, relationships)."
His editor, Colin Harrison, a novelist himself who also worked on Jarhead, says, "If people expect Jarhead Redux, that would be unfortunate. This is a novel doing its own thing and should be judged on its own terms and own merits."
Swofford recalls a joint appearance in Portland, Ore., with Barry Lopez, the acclaimed nature writer. Lopez has written 17 books, but is remembered by many for 1978's Of Wolves and Men, and is often asked, "Aren't you the wolf guy?"
Lopez advised Swofford that when he's asked, "Aren't you the Jarhead guy?" to "smile, say yes, then add, 'But I have this new book out …' "
Ellie