Academic literature on the topic 'Anthony Swofford'

Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's 2003 memoir of the Persian Gulf War, and My War: Killing Time in Iraq, Colby Buzzell's 2005 memoir of the Iraq War, emphasize the authors' voyeuristic delight in watching war movies before and during their military service. What follows their enthusiastic consumption of “military pornography,” however, is a crisis of nonidentification and a lingering uncertainty about the significance of war in their own lives. Swofford and Buzzell find that the gaze they initially wielded is turned on them, and in response Swofford roils with sexually coded anger and frustration while Buzzell chooses to amplify his exposure by starting a blog. The two memoirs, then, provide a compelling account of the relation between changing technologies of representation and the experience of postmodern war. These lines of sight, all targeting the spectacle of combat, reveal the contemporary intersections among war, media, and agency.

The censored media coverage of the Persian Gulf War obscured the region's geography and erased the suffering of combatants and civilians. In contrast, the literature and film on the war emphasize the human rather than the technological dimension of the fighting. The words and images used to represent the foot soldiers' deeply personal experiences are bound to the landscape. This essay sets forth a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives, which entails the study of an array of geographically oriented codes for making meaning out of wartime experience. The study of geographic signs in these narratives revolves around images and descriptions of the desert, which permeate such literary and filmic accounts of the ground fighting as Anthony Swofford's memoir Jarhead (2003), Sam Mendes's film adaptation Jarhead (2005), and David Russell's Three Kings (1999). Practicing a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives allows us to rethink the war, to reimagine what its stories might signify—morally as well as politically.

This article explores abjection as a normative construct — a tool of punishment and persuasion that, in military contexts, leaves women ‘hanging’ outside proper subjectivity. Moving through an analysis of Kayla Williams’ 2005 memoir of military service, Love My Rifle More Than You, and touching on Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, the article explores the uses of shunning and ‘penetrability’ in consolidating group warrior bonds at the expense of ‘the female.’ Finally, it is suggested that the omnipresence of bonding as an interest behind gender creation in military spheres may open a new space for political acts.