November 30, 2005

NEW YORK TIMES: WAR IS HELL

You can always count on the New York Times to shed darkness and spread confusion wherever it can in the service of its ideology and politics. Continuing what has recently become a consistent weekend feature—news for hand-wringers, for the walking worried, and for the perplexed and dismayed of the Upper West Side. Horsefeathers singles out from an array of grim possibilities something it knows a thing or two about—psychopathology.

Saturday’s front-page story below the fold is ambiguously entitled “The Struggle to Gauge War’s Psychological Cost,” by their reporter Benedict Carey, continued onto the whole of page 8. The size of the article together with its front page positioning would suggest to the innocent reader that America has major mental health problems among its young people in the armed services, and the article’s hazy, rambling style provides neither reassurance nor clarity.

NYT’s reporter Carey has no real news to report to us except that some members of the armed forces find their service stressful. But by innuendo, implication, and obfuscation he manages to suggest that the Iraqi war is a special war, a different war more likely to drive our soldiers crazy because of its moral ambiguity. “Military psychiatry has always been close to a contradiction in terms. Psychiatry aims to keep people sane; service in wartime makes demands that seem insane….This war in particular presents profound mental stresses: unknown and often unseen enemies, suicide bombers, a hostile land with virtually no safe zone, no real front or rear. A 360-degree war, some call it, an asymmetrical battle space that threatens to injure troops' minds as well as their bodies.”

Well, of course, as anyone can tell you who has studied the history of warfare over the years, such an idea is nonsense ever since Lt. Henry Shrapnel developed the concept of an anti-personnel shell at the end of the eighteenth century. This diabolic device was meant to explode into a thousand pieces, causing widespread mutilation among soldiers. Over the years with improvements in artillery technology—first timed fuses, then proximity fuses—death and mutilation by way of long-range artillery barrages became modern war’s most terrifying and effective weapon.

The proximity fuse was developed by joint British–American research and was already adopted for ground bombardment in the Second World War. This type of fuse allowed field artillery to burst shells in the air at a lethal distance above ground targets without having to establish the exact range for the fuse setting. The effect on the soldier was devastating and demoralizing because death and destruction could come at any time from some invisible enemy many miles away. And in twentieth-century wars, hundreds of millions of invisible, unexpected mutilating land mines have terrorized soldiers much like shrapnel.

Oh, and what about suicide bombing, and that war with no safety-zone, with no front and a 360 degree space? There hasn’t been a front since 1918, and why use suicide bombers when you can use homicide bombers—thousands of four-engine bombers carrying millions of tons of bombs to every corner of the globe at any time, day or night, unexpectedly. Sixty million people died in World War II, more civilians than soldiers in places like Stalingrad, Nagasaki, London, Coventry, Cassino, Berlin—a 360 degree space the world over.

Our enemies in Iraq, compared to our enemies in the past, and the amount of terror that they are capable of, compared to what our soldiers in the past have had to face, are a pathetically hapless bunch. Our enemies can cause death and mutilation only in small numbers—that is what is special about this war. So reporter Carey’s theory that what’s driving our soldiers mad is that this war is especially terrifying because of the invisibility or ambiguity of the enemy is more nonsense.

Carey’s report suggests that a large number of our fighting men and women are affected by depression, anxiety and a dubious diagnosis left over from Vietnam called a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “But just how deep those mental wounds are, and how many will be disabled by them, are matters of controversy. Some experts suspect that the legacy of Iraq could echo that of Vietnam, when almost a third of returning military personnel reported significant, often chronic, psychological problems….And at bases back home, there have been violent outbursts among those who have completed tours….And three members of a special forces unit based at Fort Carson, in Colorado Springs, have committed suicide.”

When Horsefeathers tried to confirm whether the above-mentioned set of three suicides had anything to do with their deployment overseas we ran into a helpful chap named Staff Sgt. Kyle Cosner, spokesman for the Tenth Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, who indicated that Carey knew all of the details of the story of the suicides from other journalists who had published stories about the men back in October. Carey, unfortunately, neglected to include in his report the important fact that the cases of the three men of the Tenth Special Forces unit who committed suicide had been investigated by the Army CID (Criminal Investigation Division) and that it had found that none of the suicides were thought to be connected to overseas deployment. And that in fact they each had enough psychological baggage and trouble in their personal lives to account for their acts of suicide. It is even possible that an anti-malarial medication which they all were taking may have been a cause or contributing factor in their bizarre behavior.

But reporter Carey did not think it was safe to allow his readers to make up their own minds about the connection between these suicides and whether they were attributable to their Iraqi deployment. Big Brother wants to help you think about these things. Carey justifies his distortion of the facts on the grounds that the Defense Department is politically motivated to cover up the presumably large numbers of soul-wounded men and women who are victims of the military-Bush malfeasance. “Yet for returning service members, experts say, the question of whether their difficulties are ultimately diagnosed as mental illness may depend not only on the mental health services available, but also on the politics of military psychiatry itself, the definition of what a normal reaction to combat is and the story the nation tells itself about the purpose and value of soldiers' service.”

Naturally, reporter Carey will always be able to find somebody to interview who will put the right words into his article. Here is pretty Specialist Abbie Pickett’s story (her before and after pictures appear on the front page.): “Specialist Pickett, who served with the Wisconsin Army National Guard and whose condition has been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.‘You never want family to hear that, and it's a selfish thing to say. But I'm not a typical 23-year-old, and it's hard being a combat vet and a woman and figuring out where you fit in.’ Specialist Pickett, has struggled with symptoms of depression …and a seething resentment over her service, partly because of what she describes as irresponsible leaders and a poorly defined mission. Her memories make good bar stories, she said, but they also follow her back to her apartment, where the combination of anxiety and uncertainty about the value of her service has at times made her feel as if she were losing her mind.”

Since war has been studied in modern times, it has been observed that there are a great many factors in war situations that may play a role in the development of psychopathology: length of exposure to battle, the quality of leadership, the unit morale, rest, food, physical relief from the weather and—most of all—pre-war psychological strength, adaptability, and emotional maturity. It is almost never any one bombardment or battle that will result in severe pathology, but a combination of many aggravations and chronic things which combine with a sensitive and troubled personality.
Psychiatric experience and practice indicates that something very similar is at work in everyday life. One finds in practice that almost anything can become a “trauma” or trigger that can stimulate chronic pathology—childbirth, puberty, the onset of menstruation, loss of a loved one, job loss, marriage, divorce—almost anything that has serious emotional meaning. Strangely enough, the connection between the triggering experience and the chronic symptomatology is not easy to connect. Often there are one or more intervening layers of psychological symptoms, such as chronic drinking, or weight gain, or chronic school failure.

The main point in this context is that there is little likelihood of military service triggering a chronic psychological illness without some degree of latent pre-military psychopathology. At the end of the article even Carey must acknowledge this clinical fact by quoting that “…others say that the rates of the disorder are just as likely to diminish in the next year, as studies show they do for disaster victims….Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, said that given the stresses of this war, it was worth noting that five out of six service members who had seen combat did not show serious signs of mental illness….The emotional casualties, Colonel Ritchie said, are ‘not just an Army medical problem but a problem that … the civilian system… as a whole must work to solve.’”

Carey’s report is characteristic of the NY Times’ pseudo-analytical journalism—deep trash. It identifies a “problem,” gets several experts to provide quotes that state the Times’ point of view, a couple of paragraphs of muddled and contradictory statistical facts which are either meaningless or, worse, obfuscating. Then come two or three interviews with the disgruntled victims of the injustice that the Times has identified, in this case stress caused by a morally ambiguous war brought about by poor leadership. And finally, what is most reprehensible is that the interviewees either do not realize they are being exploited by the Times’ reporter, or they—the “victims”—and the reporter are exploiting each other.

November 22, 2005

LIBERALISM AND THE FEMINIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MALE

“…Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood…”(Horsefeathers bolding)--Gen. George S. Patton in his speech to the troops before D-Day, June 6, 1944

        Horsefeathers has argued that contemporary Liberalism, as embodied by the Democratic left, has devolved into a set of limp-wristed attitudes, a self-flattering pose, rather than a political philosophy. As Paul Hollander trenchantly put it:
“For many “being on the left” has come to mean not specific policies but a diffuse sentimental claim on virtue, hope, and morality—as for example for Richard Rorty who associates the left with the idea of “defending the weak against the strong.” Those still sympathetic to these political ideologies and systems that supposedly embodied these good intentions see themselves as idealists, people of strong and pure feelings, selfless critics of evil and especially greed. Their sense of identity is durably stamped by such increasingly and irrepressibly sentimental self-conceptions. William Sloan Coffin, the venerable “activist” and social critic of the 1960s tellingly entitled his recent “essays on public morality” as “The Heart is a Little to the Left.”
        Among the shared sentimental beliefs of such people is the belief that human beings are naturally good, that aggression is entirely a reaction to frustration, whether in small children forced to submit to adult rules, or in adults forced to live under the cruel imperatives of market driven economies. It is useless to point out that reality contradicts their fantasies, that, for example, the sentimental yearnings for an egalitarian, socialist world always lead to practical disaster. Try telling that to, say, Tom Friedman, as he searches for socialist utopia in China or Israel. The dream lives on because human nature remains unchanged. Adhering to a utopian fantasy of a world free of conflict serves as a defense against the unwelcome awareness of aggression in oneself. Thus the most virulent spewing of hatred towards the President is not regarded as evidence of the haters’ own irrational aggression, but rather is explained as merely reactive to the duplicitous machinations of Mr. Bush. For the same reason, it is useless to cite the lessons of history—that war is a never ending aspect of the human condition, and that appeasement never works. A very bright liberal friend who recently read Michael Shaara’s historical novel, Killer Angels, about the bloody Battle of Gettysburg, told me she finished it with the thought, “I hate war. We should never go to war”. When I pointed out that the civil war was a necessary war---as Shaara himself made clear—she retorted “there is no necessary war, they should have negotiated a settlement.” The natural political home of such utopians, the Democratic party, is dominated by similar self flattering pacifist sentiments, loudly and aggressively amplified by wordsmith elites on campuses, in the media and the entertainment world. It is a feature of the contemporary Liberal mind to be unaware of its own simmering rages, the more intense for being barred from consciousness.
        Why has liberalism, once a muscular political philosophy, become a fuzzy, sentimental and self referential set of politically correct beliefs, incapable of self criticism? We would suggest it is because, with few exceptions, the elite class of wordsmiths (MSM, Ivy league liberal arts faculties, school teachers, the therapeutic professions, Hollywood) were, as children, good little boys and girls, who did well in class (see Robt. Nozick’s essay: Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism) and were especially facile with words. They were the teachers’ pets, eager to please and quick to discern what made teachers smile with delight. They were not the kids who enjoyed learning physical skills in shop or auto mechanics class, nor were they kids who developed persistence and mastery of tough challenges.
        What Nozick omitted to mention is that the future wordsmiths were those children who devalued the masculine virtues they lacked, in favor of feminine ones. As P.C. adults, they happily adopted the utopian fantasy that no real differences exist between male and female. Verbal ingenuity came easily. In gym, they receded into the corner while their less verbally skilled classmates found outlets for their aggression in physical competition and team sports. They scorned shop classes and auto-mechanics in favor of ‘creative writing’. They never learned the lessons of the schoolyard. They were too busy writing poems about peace, love and understanding.
        Horsefeathers is grateful that, despite his family’s academic background, and its high estimate of formal education, he grew up on the tough streets of the East Bronx. There, being one of only a few Jews in a largely Irish and Italian area, he learned to deal with the world as it is, not as one wished it to be. It soon became clear that manhood required demonstrating physical skills, but even more importantly, physical determination. Thus, when teased about wearing eyeglasses, or being a ‘Christ killer’, the alternatives were either submitting, making nice, in the hope that it would stop---but then how would one get to play in the basketball game?—or doing something active to stop it. One day, when a penknife hurtled past Horsefeathers' ear and rattled against the school yard fence, he decided enough was enough and took after his tormenter. After inflicting a bloody nose and wrestling him to the ground and making him admit defeat, Horsefeathers never again had to be concerned about being included in schoolyard games. In fact, the very same tormenter soon tried to befriend him, thus teaching a lesson for life: respect is earned through strength not weakness, and for boys, achieving manhood requires passing such tests, not flinching in the face of scary threats. Further, he slowly realized that human nature doesn’t accord with utopian fantasies: in the schoolyard there was a brutal reality to the hierarchy of talent. No effort was made to cushion the blow of being picked last by insisting that everyone is equally talented. No teacher was murmuring soothing words about how we each have our own unique talent, and no one is better than anyone else. There he also learned that showing courage was a helpful form of adaptation; if you showed you could take it and dish it out too, you gained acceptance into the fraternity of young men. Once established, you had it made, and moreover the pretty girls began to take notice. No guts, no glory. Also, in the schoolyard there was always a peer who stood out, the leader everyone wanted to emulate. He possessed superior natural talent, but was modest and never a ‘show off’. How times have changed!
        Every man, if he is honest with himself, wonders how he would react in situations of extreme danger, situations where words would not help. Would he, like many at Normandy, be paralyzed by fear and never fire a shot? Or would he emulate the boys of Pointe du Hoc? In short, would he ‘cut and run’,a la the metrosexual Democrats, or would he do what Patton expected when he said: “.. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood..."What we’ve seen in America, since Patton's day, is the rise of a wordsmith intellectual class that scorns such quaint notions as “innate manhood”, “honor” and “sense of duty”. Such concepts have been replaced, for contemporary liberals, by a set of beliefs we’ve come to know as political correctness. It is our argument that central to this set of beliefs is the denial of sexual difference. If differences are only “socially constructed”, rather than biologically determined, then we can construct a society in which the tensions arising from such differences will be abolished. All other differences—of talent, looks, intelligence---can then be eliminated by a combination of politically correct education, affirmative action and even surgical procedure. If the price is metrosexual confusion, shouldn’t we all be happy at the prospect of an end to the eternal war between the sexes? And of course, in the utopian pacifist world to come, men will no longer need to fight wars to defend women and family. Undergirding all of liberal utopianism is the denial of the biologically rooted differences between the sexes.
        To return to Patton, he also said in the same speech to the troops before D-Day in Europe: “…Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American…”
        It is now 60+ years since those words were spoken. Horsefeathers wonders, would Patton be able to say the same of today’s America?

November 18, 2005

JOHN KERRY: HE'S BAAAACK!

"There are no second acts in American lives."-F. Scott Fitzgerald.

        How could the great novelist have been so wrong? He himself demonstrated that America is the country of self-reinvention, in which there's always another act--especially if you're a modern day liberal. Failure in the confessional, therapeutic age of Oprah is a uniquely good career move, as witness Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. If only there were just two acts! Here's John Kerry to remind us that he's not going away: "Would I like to be president? Yes, obviously." In the furor kicked off by Congressman Murtha, heeeere's Johnny: ``I won't stand for the swift-boating of Jack Murtha,'' said Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004."
        It's remarkable, the intensity of hatred aimed by liberals, not at the savage Islamo-fascists who want to kill us all, but instead at President Bush. Perhaps this is because they share, with our murderous enemies, a utopian vision of a perfect world. When such fantasies don't come to pass, like infants torn from the nipple, they rend the air with cries of distress. In the House debate on a motion to pull our troops out of Iraq, one member recounted a conversation with a U.S. Marine: "Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.
``He asked me to send Congress a message - stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message - that cowards cut and run, Marines never do,'' Schmidt said.

Democrats booed and shouted her down - causing the House to come to a standstill..." The truth, when introduced to delicate, feminized children, is painful---but it remains the truth.

November 13, 2005

JARHEAD: THE BOOK & MOVIE

JARHEAD: THE BOOK

Anthony Swofford’s 2003 book “Jarhead” is not about the Gulf War or the Marine Corps, it is about Anthony Swofford’s fucked up head, as he would say, and his attempt to cure himself by joining the Marine Corps and then writing a book about it mostly blaming the Marine Corps for being a fucked up institution and fucking him and other fucked up young men up. Sometimes he was more fucked up, sometimes less—but, at any given time, it’s hard to tell which. He was about 18 when he joined the Marine Corps, and about 22 when he left the Corps and began his alcoholic, hippie-like wanderings. Eventually he got himself a college degree, took up writing, and got himself into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Eight and a half years out of the Marines he started to write “Jarhead.” At that time he wrote, “…no I am not mad. I am not well, but I am not mad…. As a lance corporal in a U.S. Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon, I saw more of the Gulf war than the average grunt. Still my vision was blurred—by wind and sand and distance…by stupidity and fear and ignorance, by valor and false pride….Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what I know.”

This explains why—this “blurred vision,” his metaphorical euphemism for being fucked up and seeing the world through his fucked up mind—so many former marines find “Jarhead” distant from their own Marine Corps experience. Two or three examples posted on Amazon will suffice:

B.D. TUCKER (ANNAPOLIS, MD):

As a Marine, a vet of the Gulf War, and a former infantry platoon commander with 1st Bn, 6th Marines (1/6), I lived in the Triangle area of the E. Province of Saudi Arabia, not too far from where Swofford's unit, 2/7, was originally located.

In struggling through the haphazard writing style in this book of purported non-fiction, I found Swofford's storyline problematic for a variety of reasons: poor research that is exhibited by his references to dates, locations, and events that at a minimum are inaccurate or did not occur when he says they did; a pervasively cynical attitude exhibited by the rank and file that I know exists, but that he asserts is rarely mitigated by infantry Marines displaying courage and integrity; the total absence of company and field grade officers who are respected by the rank and file and who are competent; the sheer incompetence of his battalion commander and the ignorance of the battalion staff; a questionable characterization of scout snipers roaming the desert during the ground combat phase of the Gulf War(I can't vouch for 2/7 or TF Grizzly, but at no time while I was ashore did our battalion or our regiment employ STA Marines in the manner that Swofford's unit does in the book); the almost complete breakdown in tactical discipline on the third day of the ground war by a rifle company of Marines in Swofford's battalion; and the near complete absence of positive leadership from Marine Staff COs and NCOs, save SSgt Sieck.

Throughout the book, Swofford careens from a crazed post adolescent desire to kill somebody in order to prove his mettle to a disprited and despondent pseudo-victim of the horrors of war, the worst of which he never sees or experiences, except in his unfulfilled fantasies. He says at the beginning that this story is "what I know", not what he remembers or how he remembers it. One is led to believe that what Swofford recounts actually happened. The further I read, the more convinced I was that Swofford was either shoveling a few loads of b.s for the liberal reviewers with no military experience who found this book so appealing as the voice of the common grunt, or that he actually believed the stuff he was writing about happened the way he said it did.

Throughout the book there are numerous passages of almost sublime writing that I wished would prevail over the abject negativity and darkness of this book. Although some of his descriptions were strained and confusing, he is a gifted writer, yet this book does not showcase his writing on a level of acclaim that supports the opinion of the majority of civilian reviewers. I respect Mark Bowden and many others who found Jarhead compelling, but hardly any of them ever served a day in uniform and do not bring that military perspective to the discussion.

I have never walked in Anthony Swofford's boots as a STA Marine in 2/7, but I have humped a ruck many klicks in the Arabian desert with some of the finest infantry Marines who I had the pleasure and privilege to lead, and not even the most cynical Marine among them ever came close to displaying the brooding selfishness and self loathing that Swofford exhibits in his book. He is, as he says, free to write what he wants about that war, its politics, and the Corps, warts and all, but he does not do the Corps, his fellow Marines, and especially himself any service by disparaging so many of them and depicting them as unintelligent stereotypes in this rant called Jarhead.

(I might add that I can count on one hand the number of times in my 13 year career that I have heard a fellow Marine, especially an enlisted Marine, refer to another as a "jarhead" and I have lived in a fighting hole within feet of my Marines….)

SGT. B. IVERS (FT. COLLINS, CO):

I roomed with Tony for a year or so. I was not with him in STA platoon during the Gulf war, I was there with G 2/7 2nd Platoon. I hooked up with STA 2/7 after the war. Tony is a nice enough guy and even then he had ambitions of becoming a teacher. Tony had fun off duty,he loved playing sports, drinking and finding girls to chase….. I read this book in Iraq in 2003. I remembered a lot about Tony. This book is about him and his view of what happened during his time in the Corp. I agree with many other reviewers that a lot is hyped and some stuff was fabricated. I can say that a lot of what he talks about happened but not perhaps as he remembered it.

Tony was not a school trained sniper. He spent very little time with a line company before testing and making STA platoon. The discipline problems in the platoon, when I got there in late 91 were serious…. We did have issues with morale in 2/7 during the Gulf War as over 80% of the battalion had just got out of boot camp, it was a real problem. But for every issue in that Battalion there were answers in the NCO leadership and people stepping up to the plate to get the job done. The whining in the book is excessive, and Tony had a tendency then, to do that.

The book is less about combat than it is about a young man trying to find himself, and this included the embellishments with it. To put this thing in perspective the gulf war was nothing compared to the 24/7 combat operations that are going on in Iraq and Afganistan now. For every Swofford there is a lot more squared away Marines who really believe in what they are doing, who are bleeding and dying for each other and their country.

The book is a confirmation to all liberals of their world view of the Marine Corp and our countries mission as being flawed. It is a sad work for any Marine who is and remains faithful to God Country and Corp….

The definitive book on the Gulf War awaits its author. This is not it. It was war as he knew it, not as it is, or was. Tony made it where he wanted to be, a professor and writer. He is making money from this thing, with the war going on, a continuation of the 3 day war he never got to fire a round in.

I did not like the book and I can't recommend it. Tony has issues, the book is his liberal agenda.

MARK A. ROCCO (DAYTON, OH):

Sorry to tell you all... but... Anthony Swofford is in need of some serious mental help. I was there, I was a Marine Grunt with India 3/9, Task Force Papa Bear for the first Gulf War. Swofford's novel (if you want to call it that) is soooooooooooooooooooo beyond fiction, tall tales, exaggeration, false bravado, and very likely the only truth from the book is that Swafford was smoking crack cocaine while writing it.

For others that were there, what a disgrace Swofford brings upon us with his book and NOW, someone is funding a movie of this trash.

…. Swofford's book is NOT about the psychology of men in combat. I'd say it's more about a man who needed help, and still needs help. One thing is for sure, Swofford would have never made it 60 days in MY Marine Corps as we would have identified him as unstable and untrustworthy right off the bat. Last, if he would have EVER pointed a weapon at me for any reason, I would have killed him before the sun went down that day. Does that sound tough? Macho? No one points weapons at other Marines and nothing happens about it. Of course for Super Marine, Anthony Swofford....... the guy who busts up bars and never gets charged, who can run all night till the sun comes up, who likes to french kiss the muzzle of his M16, chew/suck on bullets and cry about every 8 hours….

….Swofford doesn't just "get things mixed up." It's understandable to mix dates up, who was there and who wasn't, the name of a bar or the name of a town. We all do that due to memory and time gone by. This is to be expected and no foul called. BUT... Swofford's errors are calculated falsehoods. All veterans absolutely HATE the blowhard sitting at the bar telling embellished war stories (guess why kerry lost this election). Swofford is exactly to us what kerry was to the SwiftBoat Veterans. Just like the SwiftBoat Veterans, we just want the truth to be told. What I've listed above in my page by page tearing of his book is mostly stuff that we (Marines) know to be HUGE tall tales and BS. This stuff IS NOT stuff that gets mixed up in memory over time but stuff that someone has to intentionally create. The theme to all of this BS is absolutely someone puffing his chest out and playing hardass retard.

NOW.... I'm going to throw Swofford a bone as it's only fair. First, Swofford DOES accurately capture the drinking, whoring and brotherhood that the Marine Corps truly is. Most of us would agree with that no questions asked….

….Swofford may be a good writer, but his book could have been tweaked in many ways. The bottom line is that a large portion of the book is embellishment and it VERY MUCH turns off those of us that were there. There are enough TRUE stories and incidents from that era of the Corps and Desert Storm to write 100 books and make 10 movies but it's sad that Swofford's stuff may end up being the definitive reference of it all.

“Thus what follows is neither true nor false but what I know.” This disavowal of historical truth, as Horsefeathers hears it, is not an act of humility, a way of explaining one’s limitations. It is the proud expression of the transcendent artist who cannot be bothered worrying about mere historical truth when he can supply a higher, poetic truth. In fact both Swofford’s enlistment into the Marines and the writing of his “memoir” were attempts at self-cure and self-justification. And “Jarhead,” the ten year product of this process, still bears the stigmata of its origin.

Jarhead is a term that is essentially derived from the high, tight haircut that new enlistees get when they are inducted into the Marines. But the word has a special meaning for Swofford. It means misfit, fuck-up, loser, failure—any or all of the above. And in his narrative he makes clear, without real self-knowledge, that he was a jarhead long before he ever got to the Marines. In fact that was why he was eventually drawn unconsciously to the life of the grunt.

When he was seventeen he wanted to sign up for the Corps but his father refused to allow him to at that age. “My father knocked on my door….I tried to look angry rather than sad. ‘As soon as you can sign that contract on your own [17 ½], go ahead. Until then, I’m responsible for you. I’m not stronger than you, but I know some things about the military that they don’t show you in the brochures.’”

“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 the college boy hoping to find a girl¬friend and later a job.”

Growing up he was too close and too attached to his mother, a chronically depressed woman who grieved her life away mourning for Swofford’s psychotically suicidal and institutionalized sister. By the time he was twelve he was full of fears and a misfit even at Boy Scout camp. “¬Before joining the Marine Corps I'd fired two weapons—a bow and arrow and a .22-caliber rifle, both at Boy Scout camp, at the age of twelve. If I hadn't requested to leave camp a week early, I would've also fired a shotgun and a larger-caliber rifle, but I missed my mother, had no friends at camp, the food was lousy, I was afraid of showering in public—actually, in the forest, the shower not a shower but half a dozen garden hoses draped over the lowest branches of a pine—and the leader of the camp was grouchy and probably a drunk. Because I cried-out a week early, and my parents lost the nonrefundable fee, I had to repay the money for the aborted second week. My mother supported me and my sweet rea¬soning behind quitting camp (that I missed her), but my father insisted I repay the money—my Boy Scout camp fees came from general family vacation funds, and to be fair to the rest of the family, members of the tribe who stayed the duration of their camps of choice, I had to reimburse my parents for the lost week. I don’t remember if I ever repaid this money, but I did miss the larger weapons, and for many years I felt inferior for never having fired a shotgun or large caliber rifle.”

His view of the Corps was no different from his jaundiced view of the pre-Jarhead world, only more concentrated: “I hated the Marines and I hated being a marine. I wore earrings while on leave and liberty, grew sideburns, hung out with gay navy guys who knew the best straight clubs anywhere—jarhead free clubs….”

His early roommates, Bottoms and Frontier “…were drunks and not the simple drunks who are concerned only with their own drunkenness, their own sad stupor, but social drunks, the poor bastards who feel it is their duty to fill every mouth in the house with drink. So nightly they filled me up….I was happy to drink with Frontier and Bottoms…[who were] dedicated to debasing the stan¬dards and policies of the institution… I enjoyed hearing their manifestos against the Corps, the Suck, as they called it, ‘… because it sucks the life out of you.’ After spending time around Frontier and Bottoms, I realized the grunt holds the Spiritual High Ground because he creates it; through constant bitching and inebriation he creates his own Grunt island, and the poor, sad, angry grunt on the outside is actually a happy and contented grunt on the inside, because he has been heard, someone understands his misery: through profanity and disgrace he has communicated the truth of his being….The constant clatter of the discarded liquor bottles and the cackles and howls from my roommates helped me forget that I'd made a mistake by joining the Corps.”

But he needed the Corps, the way an orphan of the storm needs a home: “I'd always worried about losing my home and running out of everything—out of love, money, food, shelter, and transportation. As a teenager I often suffered anxious daydreams of becoming homeless, out of a job, unskilled and unloved. I pictured myself on street corners, in the rain, with a filthy dog I couldn't afford to feed…. Obviously, these weren't the only reasons for my fear of homelessness:
my family was disintegrating because of my father's disinterest and infidelity, and I projected his emo¬tional distance many years further into my own life, when I too would become a lonely and despondent man.

“I joined the Marine Corps in part to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home…. The simple domesticity of the Marine Corps is seductive and dangerous. Some men claim to love the Corps more than they love their own mother or wife or children—this is because lov¬ing the Corps is uncomplicated. The Corps always waits up for you. The Corps forgives your drunken¬ness and stupidity. The Corps encourages your bru¬tality.”

And eventually, on his stumbling march to health he gains some degree of pride and maturity by learning the art of the scout/sniper, being able to deliver “a dime at a grand.” That is, the ability to shoot three shots at a target a thousand yards away so close together that they can be covered by a dime. A difficult and enviable skill to acquire.

Swofford leaves us in the dark about how he became a published writer. It is clear that he was able to outgrow some of his Jarheadedness, his anti-authoritarian rage, so that he could learn to write a publishable memoir/novel. And what better subject than turning his Marine experience into a copycat Viet Nam novel as though that were the real source of his rage and fears, perhaps another “The Things They Carried,” or “A Rumor of War.” Or better yet make it so bitter and full of “Fucking this and fucking that” and antinomianism that it can become another “Apocalypse Now,” or “Platoon.” And what better sources for gripping prose than the scene in which he puts the rifle barrel in his mouth ready to blow his brains out in desperation. Or the scene in which he is ready to blow the brains out of one of the members of his platoon. The only witness to either of these scenes is his long-dead best friend. (The friend did not die because of the war but because of drunk driving after leaving the Marines.)

There is much that is amateurish about the writing. You hear undigested bits of Hemingway, Kerouac, the plaintive voices of Holden Caulfield and Alex Portnoy, and even the Dostoyevskian sinner anti-hero. And there is much that is pretentious in the book, Swofford’s need to demonstrate to the reader that he is not really a retard by constantly referring to his intellectual preferences—Camus rather than porno magazines, or “The Iliad” rather than comic books, or “The Myth of Sysiphus,” or “The Works of Nietsche.”All of these he lugs over the Arabian desert to prove his intellectual manhood.

If only he could have stopped playing pretend Viet Nam and anti-war and allowed himself to see the comic aspects of the Gulf War, a war defined by Iraqi ineptitude and American overkill, a war in which he and his comrades killed no one, were never in danger, and were never injured, he could have written a painfully funny and true story. In fact he is quite good at the comedy of quotidian frustrations and stupidities of military life—his shitter detail, his running war with his dog-tags, his assignment as the Catholic lay reader of his outfit. He has a sharp eye for absurdity and a good ear for the comic if only he could get past his bitterness and pretensions.

JARHEAD: THE MOVIE

Reviewed by DI Sgt. A. Parody

This movie is one long piece of shit. It is made by fags, shitbags and possibly communists for morons. If you go to see this movie and you’re an American over fourteen, you’ll probably puke.

The whole point of the fucking movie is to show that marines are fuckheads, retards and killers who would kill anyfuckingbody. That they’re all fucking Calleys like at My Lai. This shitbucket of Hollywood fags has this idea about warriors, that they have no goddamn sense, and no fucking conscience. So they make this fucking movie where every marine fuckface can’t do anything but get drunk or think about fucking whores and shooting dead fucking shithead Iraqis.

So there’s this fucking retard hero, some jerkoff named Gyllenhaal who’s supposed to be Swofford. Now everybody in the Corps knows that Tony Swofford was mostly out of his fucking mind while he was in the Gulf. But not in this piece of shit movie. You see everything through his fucking eyes and he’s supposed to be sane, so you get the goddamn idea that what he sees is true. Now how is that for a puke-making idea. There is more shit in this movie than there is in a fucking cow pasture.

There are no goddamn officers shown who know what they’re fucking doing, so you get the idea that the fucking flies have taken over the fucking flypaper. It’s a fucking circus and there’s nobody in fucking command.

Not only that, these Hollywood buttfucking commies make up things that aren’t even in the goddamn book—forced hot branding, burning the flesh of fellow marine fucks.

Then they show, these fucks, an entire platoon going crazy during combat operations.

One crazy fuckhead threatening to kill another marine at point blank range with a loaded M16 in a rage, and then turning the weapon on himself and asking to be killed.

And stupidest of all there is a nonstop use of the "F" word throughout the whole fucking movie.

Don’t bother seeing this piece of shit.

November 08, 2005

THERE IS NO NEGATIVE IN THE NYTIMES UNCONSCIOUS

        How many ways can the NYTimes tell us Islam has no role in the French intifada? As Islamo-Nazis shout 'allahu akbar' while rioting against the 'infidel' regime, the Times is seeking root causes. These are the usual Marxist economic explanations. Their solution: affirmative action, empathic understanding, more government programs to provide more jobs, and never mind that the recipients of such largesse don't want to work for the infidels and are economically far better off unemployed in the West, than living in Muslim states. Craig Smith, of the Times, when not trying to minimize the scope of the French intifada, ("...Paris and even its suburbs show no obvious signs of crisis. The highway to Charles de Gaulle Airport, which passes by some of the hardest-hit suburbs, was flowing normally on Monday, with no visible police presence...") has, for the last 10 days, been emphasizing "root cause" economic explanations, while blaming government officials like Nicholas Sarkozy for referring to the rioters as 'scum'. Gee what delicate sensibilities these "youth" possess! We should instead, I suppose, call them 'protesters' or 'insurgents'. Yet even in Smith's despatches, if one reads deeply into them, past the rationalizations and the disavowals, lo and behold we discover "...While the violence has not taken on religious overtones most of the young people involved are nominally Muslim, raising fears that Islamist groups could capitalize on the unrest to recruit new members. Internet postings from one such movement encouraged young Muslims elsewhere in Europe to riot in the name of Islam.
"Oh, you Muslim people in Europe, walk with and like your brothers in Paris and learn that these people are dogs," read a message posted on Monday on the popular Web site of a dissident based in London. "Teach them that we are a single nation and if a single member is touched, then all the others will erupt like a burning volcano..."(our emphases) Gee, we couldn't possibly be witnessing an episode in the jihad against infidel Europe.
        The NYTimes's Marxist economic determinism, its touching utopian faith in "root cause" explanations, is matched only by its ignorance of religion as a force in human history. After 10 days of reporting worthy of Walter Duranty, Craig Smith is slowly letting the truth emerge, through a smog of disavowal and denial. Totalitarian Islam has an army of willing Jihadis ready to slit the throat of useful idiots like Craig Smith. Yes indeed, it's the religion, stupid!

November 06, 2005

THE FRENCH SOLUTION

        The French supported arch terrorist Yasser Arafat and his intifada against Israel for years. They protected Saddam, while accepting oil-for-food bribes. They welcomed Arafat as a dying hero in his last AIDS ridden hours and shed crocodile tears for the Nobel peace prize winner. And what did it get them? A spreading intifada has followed its late leader from Gaza to France. Perhaps the government should follow the advice it constantly gave Israel: Don't retaliate against terrorism. Give land for peace. Why not offer the Islamo-savages Paris and keep the wine growing region, since alcohol is forbidden anyway for devout Muslims. Besides, those treasures at the Louvre are an offense to Islamic sensibilities and could be disposed of as were the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. If that's not enough, Cannes and Nice could be purged of their decadent pleasures by a really devout Imam or two.
        We are told that the intifada has been provoked by French discrimination and so, as a good will gesture, adoption of Sharia law might quell the anger. Instead of speaking harshly of the muslim terrorists, M. Sarkozy should demonstrate empathy for their plight, by apologizing for France's 'crusader mentality'. A few gang rapes and honor killings by Frenchmen would demonstrate true multicultural sensitivity and acceptance of their Islamic countrymen.

November 03, 2005

SUCH A MEAN OLD MAN

Here's the headline accompanying the NYTimes assessment of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alitto:

"Alito's Dissents Show Deference to Lower Courts
Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s dissents often took issue with decisions that sided with criminal defendants and immigrants..."

Oh, the horror!

November 02, 2005

HORSEFEATHERS TAKES A LOOK INTO MAUREEN DOWD

Don’t be fooled by the title of Maureen Dowd’s essay in the October 30th edition of “The New York Times Magazine.” The piece, entitled “What’s a Modern Girl to Do,” is not really about the modern girl, it is about Maureen Dowd. You can tell this from the fact that the Times’ Magazine doesn’t usually have pictures of the authors of its articles, but of the article’s subjects. And there on the page facing the opening is a full-page photo of Maureen Dowd in unrestrained fantasy mode.

It is a dramatic representation, obviously envisioned by her. There she is in a darkened bar, sitting with her shapely legs showing, wearing fishnet stockings and brazen red shoes with four-inch heels. She is sitting on a barstool that is covered in faux tigerskin, with a drink in front of her and staring past the camera into space with a look that could be contempt mixed with yearning. Daylight is pouring in from a window behind her through a thin bluish tobacco haze, highlighting the tough-looking bartender sprawled over the bar and staring intently at her.

The picture, of course, is a little joke Ms. Dowd is having with us. The caption of the picture is “Looks should be deceiving.” (This technique of avowing and disavowing with a little joke is a trademark of Ms. Dowd’s style.) What are the picture and the joke telling us about her? Ms. Dowd tells us in the essay, adapted from her forthcoming book “Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide,” that early in life she was enthralled by glamorous movies, seeing herself as Ginger dancing with Fred or Myrna Loy sharing cocktails with William Powell, or Hepburn doing zany turns with Cary Grant. All very stylish, witty, urbane, and asexual. But the scenario she creates for the Times’ Magazine photo is a scene full of sexual innuendo: the woman sitting alone in the smoke-filled bar, her attractive legs in fishnet stockings, the insolent high-heeled, red shoes, the leering bartender, all suggesting a noirish Rita Hayworth movie in which Glen Ford rescues this good-bad girl from her unchaste man-hating past. Naturally, this sharp-tongued woman with her virtuous Irish Catholic girlhood, has to disavow the darker, vamp-like side of her nature by her jokey caption.

The picture informs much of the essay and although she strives to make her thesis a general one she gets her “data,” her social observations, from clones of herself. Her journalist colleagues, the folks she meets at her gym, the people of her urbane, upper- middle-class, intellectual, sophisticated, bicoastal world. No mention of Tilly the toiler, Harriet the hairdresser, Sally the secretary, Miriam the schoolteacher. No mention of the waitresses in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the salesgirls of Nashville, the librarians of Allentown, Pa. She knows and speaks for the metrosexual world only.

The book her mother gave Ms. Dowd when she was 25, “How to Catch and Hold a Man,” had advice in it that she chose not to hear in the red hot glow of 60s feminism: “Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat….Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head…by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors….Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.” Now at 53 or 54 she has bittersweet thoughts about what has happened since the heydays of Women’s Lib and brassiere burning. She notes with chagrin that modern young women have regressive tendencies: they like being dependent, having doors opened for them, not going dutch on a date, flirting; they don’t mind the idea of hunting their quarry, playing hard to get, and pleasuring their men.

When she left home, in 1969, women were busting out all over—becoming sexual, earning their own money, acting like men. “I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her [mother] when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.” Despite her Mother’s warning that “…Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

She has come, in the last 36 years, to understand with chagrin the feminist values that she had so intensely idealized were written in sand. “Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.”

Ms. Dowd’s words appear to accept the regressive realities of the new generation of women but deep down she has nothing but contempt and scorn for them and their values.

“Many women now do not think of domestic life as a ‘comfortable concentration camp,’ as Betty Friedan wrote in ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ where they are losing their identities and turning into ‘anonymous biological robots in a docile mass.’ Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of….to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.”

These contemptible young women “…fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics …”

Her great fear is that twenty years from now history will repeat itself and “…we will see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of….

“It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.”

Because she is so clever and urbane it is easy for her to rationalize her Weltanschauung as it regards men so that all aspects of the relationship between men and women are seen through the prism of power, dependence/independence, competition, master/slave, who’s top dog, submission/control. She looks for and finds this network of values everywhere. “…There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent….Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women….Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship. ‘With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?’ says a guy I know….I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career…How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.”

Actually Dowd is not interested in the Modern Girl; that’s a little myth that she has created for herself. Her world is the Alpha world—the world of Alpha males and their female counterparts who bestride the peaks inside the Beltway, Manhattan, and Hollywood. Although she likes to think of herself as coming from the world of the Irish working class, her fascination is with powerful men—presidents, movie stars, gatekeepers of the cultural and political world—because these are the people who have power—her love potion.

And she is richly endowed with great charm and a powerfully surgical wit. With the former she bewitches her Alpha males—George H. W. Bush, Michael Douglas, Howell Raines, and a long list of other powerful men—and with the latter, her sarcastic wit, she diminishes them. Those she has known and used describe her as “bewitching” or as a “sorceress,” a modern Circe whose sexual pleasure is not in the act of intercourse but in the act of seduction—a pattern which reassures such needy females that they have greater power than the male. But with such women, unfortunately, one seduction is never enough. Perhaps that is why Dowd has never lived with any of her boyfriends. If only Ms. Dowd could hold her tongue and remember her good Mother’s proxy’s advice—“Sarcasm is dangerous—avoid it altogether”—she might find a man who would stay.

Ordinary men she disdains as more or less worthless—Mr. Cellophanes. She cannot see herself as a non-Alpha female because she sees ordinary women as contemptible and living contemptible lives in the suburbs as soulless robots.

The question “Are Men Necessary?” for her is like asking are flies necessary for spiders.

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