Jarhead: a Marine's chronicle of the Gulf War, by Anthony Swofford

Pornography for the military man?

During the Gulf War of 1991, sniper-scout Anthony Swofford of the US Marine Corps never fired a shot in anger. He did come under fire: twice, inaccurately, from the Iraqis; and once – a far more "mysterious and thrilling and terrifying" moment – from his own side. And he saw the outcome of others' shots and bombs, in the desert sprawl of mangled corpses which he envies because they can never again "suffer loneliness and fear and rage". That rage Swofford reserves for himself, his family, the Gulf conflict – and for this eloquent, searing but thoroughly ambivalent book.

Jarhead – forces slang for a cropped marine – comes garlanded with praise from Martin Amis, William Boyd, AL Kennedy. As a savagely disenchanted combat memoir in the post-Vietnam mould, it merits their applause. Swofford (whose education after Desert Storm included a stint at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop) ticks every box of this genre with crisp, bold strokes: the screwed-up military background; the years of teenage drift; the vain quest to join a "family clan of manhood" via the Marines; the profanity and brutality of training; the nerve-shredding anguish of waiting; the brief, "newborn" rush of battle; and then the long aftermath of bitterness and waste – all that you might predict. And all that Swofford delivers, in the furious impassioned prose of a lost soul who sought "poor odds and a likely death" but was cheated of them both.

A shrewd literary sensibility also shapes Jarhead: not just learnt in Iowa, but present in the watchful 20-year-old who cursed and whored with the Marines while staying somewhere else inside his head. In the desert, comrades spot him reading The Iliad in a Humvee. "That's some heavy dope, sniper. Cool," they gasp. Swofford tells you a lot about his "despair". He says less about his vanity, which this book equally confirms.

Yet the true ambivalence of Jarhead lies elsewhere. Even the author seems to think it a scorching indictment of war. It isn't. His sharpest insight arrives before his battalion ships out, as they lounge around in California watching classic Vietnam movies: Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon... He knows critics deem their bloody realism "anti-war". That's not how the Marines see them: "Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man".

In almost the same way, Jarhead sounds, artistically, half in love with what it morally detests. The book shows that close combat and its preparation allows a listless youngster to feel everything: excitement, terror, fury, hatred, panic, lust, comradely love and (not least) waves of compassion for the "enemy". Even the boredom acquires an epic sheen.

What ever his intentions, Swofford depicts war as an oasis of passion and intensity in the affectless desert of life amid a "blank generation". Surrounded by the Iraqi dead, "I realise I may never again be so alive". Exactly. That semi-camouflaged message turns Jarhead into a literary weapon that might easily backfire.