Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
    Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
    Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
    Audiobook8 hours

    Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

    Written by Anthony Swofford

    Narrated by Anthony Swofford

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    In his New York Times bestselling chronicle of military life, Anthony Swofford weaves his experiences in war with vivid accounts of boot camp, reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family.

    When the U.S. Marines -- or "jarheads" -- were sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 for the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford was there. He lived in sand for six months; he was punished by boredom and fear; he considered suicide, pulled a gun on a fellow marine, and was targeted by both enemy and friendly fire. As engagement with the Iraqis drew near, he was forced to consider what it means to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateNov 11, 2005
    ISBN9780743548885
    Author

    Anthony Swofford

    Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.

    Related to Jarhead

    Related audiobooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Surrounded by Sacrifices

      Oct 5, 2021

      Surrounded by Sacrifices
      3 min read

    • Article

      Dr. Oroc

      Jul 19, 2019

      Dr. Oroc
      8 min read

    • Article

      Letter from Editor

      Oct 23, 2017

      Letter from Editor
      3 min read

    • Article

      We Shall Never Surrender

      Mar 6, 2024

      At 103, people often ask me if I have any rules that allow me to live so long. I can't say that I do, but the thing is to go on enjoying myself and try not to think about how many people I depend on. Since I first fell over, cracking all sorts of bon

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letter from Editor

      Oct 12, 2018

      Letter from Editor
      3 min read

    • Article

      Why I Appreciate The 'Vietnam Syndrome'

      Sep 20, 2017

      About a dozen of us strolled wearily and unhappily into the Greyhound bus station early that morning on a date that we would never forget. It was Nov. 19, 1969, the date that our government told us to report for the military draft. Suddenly, as we we

      3 min read

    • Article

      Farewell To Arms

      Nov 8, 2021

      Farewell To Arms
      4 min read

    • Article

      Big Fish In A Small Pond

      Jul 28, 2020

      Big Fish In A Small Pond
      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 13, 2020

      Write to: The Editor, The Field, Pinehurst II, Pinehurst Road, Farnborough Business Park, Farnborough, Hampshire GU14 7BF. Email: field.secretary@futurenet.com LETTERS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY OR SPACE Dr Hannah Clark’s article was excellent [Huntin

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Queen’s speeches

      Sep 16, 2022

      The Queen’s speeches
      4 min read

    • Article

      Our Troops Deserve Better Than Trump’s Idea For A Flashy Parade

      Feb 19, 2018

      WHEN I SHOWED UP AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY, THE first thing they did after shaving my head was teach me to march. Over the next four years as a midshipman, I marched in countless parades, generally a couple every week. Like every other midshipman to pass

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hard Labour

      Sep 30, 2021

      AHUGE BEARDED MAN IS SLUMPED in a heap, deeply unconscious, on the floor of the telephone booth. The receiver swings to and fro above his head. Passers-by in the hotel corridor can hear an exasperated voice pleading from the earpiece “Hello! Hello! W

      9 min read

    • Article

      Sharing Stories Of The Fallen

      Feb 27, 2024

      Sharing Stories Of The Fallen
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Day The King Was Killed

      Oct 25, 2022

      The Day The King Was Killed
      12 min read

    • Article

      Ulric Cross 1917-2013

      Oct 26, 2023

      Ulric Cross 1917-2013
      2 min read

    • Article

      I March Throught Georgia

      Jul 1, 2018

      I March Throught Georgia
      6 min read

    • Article

      Bird’s Words

      Jun 5, 2023

      Here is a Pegasus cup. Cups are sold liberally at a cafe by the River Orne near Ranville in Normandy, northern France. At this time of the year, early June, the place is abuzz with tourists wanting to buy these cups and other memorabilia from the caf

      3 min read

    • Article

      Voices Of War

      Oct 28, 2021

      Voices Of War
      3 min read

    • Article

      Leather Lover

      Aug 22, 2023

      Leather Lover
      4 min read

    • Article

      A New Beginning

      May 27, 2021

      THE JOURNEYING MOON Shortly after the war I married and tried to settle down to a life in London. Like most of my generation, though, I was infected by restlessness. Early in our lives we had been given a taste for the world of action, and too much a

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letter Of The Month

      Jul 8, 2021

      Letter Of The Month
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Jarhead

    3.5/5

    483 ratings15 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Memoirs of this sort only encourage incredulity. My memory of reading this has obviusly bem deformed by subsequent history. Swofford aims for Dave Eggers territory, especially the settling of accounts with Dads Behaving Badly but I found whole enterprise indifferent.
    • 3/5
      Anthony Swofford has blown the whistle on the crudities and spiritual failure of Life in the Marine Corps, and its particular failures in the First Gulf War. Intellectually and Spiritually there's not much new here, but this file does have to be upgraded after any new war.
    • 4/5
      Written in raw, graphic language, Swofford seems to hold nothing back from readers on what it's like to be a Marine fighting in the Gulf War. He embraces the romantic brotherhood of the soldier while at the same time exposing its seedy side. Marines are broken down and rebuilt, as Swofford describes it, into ruthless killing machines. But, much to the disappointment of Swofford's unit, there is little killing in their war. Ultimately, Swofford and his fellow Marines must wrestle with what it means to be a soldier and Marine, and what their place is back home among their families, jobs, and society. During their time served, they deal with life using any available distraction: primarily prostitutes, booze, and letters from home. From Swofford's descriptions, the vices go right along with the glory in the psyche of the soldier. It's a shocking revelation for civilians, but one can't help but excuse them when Swofford describes the aftermath of war. While crudeness and profanity make the first half of the novel tough, the same language becomes tragically beautiful in his description of the Iraqi bunkers and what he found there. The repetition of phrases and the metaphors make for amazing reading. You really feel the author's soul in these lines, right down to the core of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You can really tell that these scenes haunt him at night. Swofford's experience as a soldier helps him to create language that both repulses and moves the reader. It's a good perspective on what life is like for those who fight, how they prepare their minds and bodies for war, as well as an unvarnished look at the military who looks upon these people as fodder.
    • 4/5
      a wonderfully written book. poetic and disturbing. heartrending and beautiful. i really enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      It's not a big book, but it's not an easy read either. The style is nice, the chapters short, but the atmosphere of this book is very, very disturbing. I'd seen the film and I'm happy I decided I had to read the book too.This book describes how a jarhead actually feels and thinks. Anthony Swofford was a sniper in Operation Desert Shield (later Desert Storm) and he tells about his training and his time in the desert. All I'm left with afterwards is sadness....good book.
    • 4/5
      A war memoir that is harsh, at times brutal, but also very thoughtful as well. I can understand how Abu Gharib happened, reading this, but I can also see why there is such shame in the military in the aftermath of it. A portrait of the double life men trained to kill but expected to sometimes be humane and eventually to rejoin society, struggle to lead. Hard to pigeonhole, and provides no easy answers, which is probably appropriate for such a book.
    • 4/5
      The novel, Jarhead, encompasses the military life where Anthony Swofford explains how his life was like through the Gulf War. In the beggining Anthony Swofford the protaginist is commisioned in Afghanistan and he recounts his experiences in the Marine culture, the blood lust, the alternating boredom and terror, and the absurd moments including wearing camouflage uniforms because their desert ones hadn't arrived yet, the protaginist struggles with all the B.S that he portrays through the military life. Throughout the middle of the book he perserves the military life and almost killing a man. (178/272)
    • 4/5
      This book is even better when read along with Live from Baghdad, it's the same war, but one book is written from the outside and the other inside.This book is also helpful if you know young men in the military- not necessarily close family members, but acquaintances.
    • 5/5
      I love - repeat LOVE - this book. And not in the overused, flighty sense of the word. What's not to love in a book with nonstop action with blood-boiling gunfights? But that is not Swofford's story. I have read many books that recount the exciting details of war but lack the pure human drama Swofford brings to the page. We go inside the mind of a soldier impatiently waiting for action, yet fearing and dreading when that moment will find him - and we wait with him, knowing he will tell us the truth about The Moment when he lines up his first mark, pulls the trigger, and realizes that he has taken another man's life. It never comes. When I turned the last page and saw the sun rising through my bedroom window, I wondered why I had been so enthralled and unable to put the book down. Somehow I still am not sure why I love Jarhead, but I think it is Swofford's brutal honesty that pours out of the page and forces us to confront the human side of war and look beyond the statistics.
    • 4/5
      I don't gravitate to books about war, in fact I admit to having no interest at all in the subject. But I read this book on the recommendation of a writing teacher who suggested I look at the book's structure, taking away lessons from Tony Swofford's brilliant memoir of his experience as a marine in the Gulf War.Structurally, Swofford moves us efforlessly through time - backstory and future story woven through with ease. The forward story takes us through his training exercises as well as his experiences in his unit, as they sit for months in the sand, waiting for the war to start. We get an inside look at the war machine, including some of the absurdities in how we train our young soldiers to fight. He builds credible characters whom we grow to care about, and we get inside his head as he tries to make sense of the endless waiting, the preparation for the war that never really starts. His writing is so strong, my first impulse was to say, "Ghostwritten" - no way a grunt wrote this book! Turns out though that Swofford has an Iowa MFA, he's no common grunt at all (my first clue should've been that he reads Homer while sitting in a foxhole.) The brilliance of the writing here is that he makes you think you're reading the thoughts/words of a common grunt - a testament to his understanding of building a persona. If you're an aspiring memoirist, this one can be very instructive. But probably worth a read even if you're not.
    • 3/5
      Read this before going to see the movie and was actually disappointed in the movie. But then, how could you make a movie out of the surreal enviroment that Swafford paints of the Gulf War? Great book!!
    • 4/5
      Swofford has an engaging style, really gives a feel for what being a Marine during the First Gulf War was like. I had seen the movie first, so I was a bit surprised at how dark and - dare I say - depressing the book was in comparison. Not that I would expect the experience of going to war to be amusing in any way, but the movie came at the story from a slightly more light-hearted and absurd angle. No punches pulled, the book offers more in the way of commentary and less anecdotes than I had anticipated. Even so, a very good read.
    • 4/5
      An account of one marine's life and experiences in the first Gulf War. An eye-opening story of our "elite" armed forces.
    • 4/5
      Swofford certainly has his own ideas on war. But more interesting is his study of the Marine psyche and how it's possible to be constantly ready to battle while you're bored stiff.
    • 5/5
      Damn. This is one hardhitting book, and a very good one at that. Swofford lays out his Marine experiences for all to see, good and bad, and does so without making any comentary on the political veracities behind warfighting. His message to the reader: whatever the reason for going to war, never forget the cost to those who wage it and upon whom war is waged.