After leaving military service, the author went on to college and earned a double master's degree in Fine Arts at the University of Iowa.

Swofford admits to a sense of disappointment, frustration and emptiness that comes in the wake of ultimately being cheated of any real combat experience by a war that, for many American Marines at least, ended all too quickly after enduring many months of tedious, anticlimactic suspense.

Dead Iraqi soldiers littered the desert, many having been killed by airstrikes days or weeks before Swofford and the rest of the U.S. Marine Corps invaded Kuwait.

Jarhead has an extremely violent, vulgar, pornographic diatribe, and tonight, we will learn if HPS has any intention of taking any measures to protect our students from any flagrantly obscene content.

"[3] An opponent of the ban stated: "We are allowing recruiters into schools where kids can sign on the dotted line, but they can't read about actual service members and soldiers experiences.

"[1] Swofford blamed the banning of Jarhead on "MAGA intrusionists" who objected to the book's frank depiction of the daily life of U.S.

Yet there’s not a clichéd moment in this rueful account of a Marine’s life, in which the hazards are many and the rewards few....Extraordinary: full of insight into the minds and rucksacks of our latter-day warriors".

[5] The reviewer noted that the book was not for the squeamish as Swofford recounted contracting dysentery during his time in the Middle East and how his fellow Marines mutilated the corpses of the Iraqi soldiers along the "Highway of Death".

[7] Williamson felt that the picture of the all male Marine light infantry that Swoffford presented in his book as mindlessly sexist young men who made extensive use of the services of prostitutes while having troubled relationships with their wives or girlfriends was inaccurate.

[7] Williamson concluded that the Marine Corps of the U.S. Navy are regarded as one of the premier branches of the American military, and that one would never know how this reputation was achieved from reading Jarhead.

"[8] However, Fick felt that the 2005 film adaption of Jarhead was much superior to the book..[8] Flck concluded: "Swofford’s war—boredom, loneliness, doubt, terror, rage, and numbness—is mostly inside his own head".

[9] Adams noted that Swofford's principle enemy during his time in the Middle East as recounted in Jarhead was himself as he was so trapped in despair over the prospect that his girlfriend in the United States was being unfaithful to him that he seriously contemplated committing suicide.

[9] Adams concluded: "As a result, for all its show of honesty about the realities of battle, the anger at loss of life is never quite heartfelt, and the labyrinthine self-pity at the soldier's lot never quite earned.

Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf war that will go down with the best books ever written about military life.

He captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of the long prewar desert deployment, and then powerfully records the experience of his war.

[10] Bowden wrote that the photo-op in the fall of 1990 where Swofford and his fellow Marines were told by their officers to give the most positive spin on their mission, which inspired him and the rest of Marines to engage in simulated gay sex in protest, is all too typical of the modern American military, which made Jarhead a refreshing book to read.

[10] Bowden noted: "His vision is unsparing and honest, and his emotions ring true...That voice isn't pretty -- it's just terribly and despicably beautiful.