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At 19 Anthony Swofford joined the US Marines and trained as an elite sniper. He read the Iliad and loved his gun and observed and partook of the rark 'em atmosphere of young men panting to go to war. He was very good at being a soldier.
At 30 he wrote a book called Jarhead, a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the first Gulf War and of growing up in a military family with a soldier father. Jarhead has sold, he thinks, around 500,000 copies and was made into a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Swofford.
He proved to be as good a writer as he was a sniper with skills like sitting still for long periods of time. The writer's life can be summed up as "just sitting in your chair every day and not leaving until the work of the day is done. And I think that type of discipline certainly folds over from my time in the Marine Corps."
Jarhead is reportage as much as it is memoir: brutally and often beautifully observed. "Wanting to be a writer, I was already a rather keen observer of the world around me but I would say that training as a sniper amplified my skills."
Now, at 36, he has written his second book, a novel, Exit A, the story of a young boy Severin Boxx who lives on a military base in Japan with his soldier father. Boxx is not Swofford, he says; the novel is not autobiographical. He must be used to this: readers looking for details from the writer's life. That's a consequence of your first book having been a memoir, and of having your writing mirror certain aspects of your own life.
He has always wanted to be a writer "and I joined the Marine Corps which is contrary in many ways". He had wanted his first book to be a novel. But "I just kept coming up against my autobiography. I was reluctant to write it at first. I wanted my first book to be fiction. But my own story ended up being the best story that I had at that moment."
He is in town to promote his new book but he doesn't mind talking about Jarhead, or so the publicist says. The trouble with that book is that its fascination is enduring - particularly when offered the opportunity to observe the observer.
This is the young man, still a boy in most ways, who badly wanted to kill. In the end he was denied the opportunity to take the dead-cert shot. There was agony in this, and agony in the wanting to and the aftermath of having been that person who would have taken the shot. Soldiers go to war, of course, to shoot people.
This is what all soldiers know but it is hard to reconcile this former soldier with the writer. He read the Iliad in a Humvee in another country's desert and played frat-house-type humping games with fellow marines and shouted and hooted during war movies.
He once said that he was a "quiet and meditative" person, and always had been. He wrote Jarhead, he says, to try and figure out why he joined up. "I think I've been accused of having a disjunctive nature and I think that might be true. I crave attention, then I don't want it. I crave solitude then I want to be social. So, yeah, there's that sort of disjunctive nature, probably unchanged even from youth, I would say."
Jarhead is, he says, "many things but it's also an apologia for that kid I was who wanted that shot; who wanted to go out and kill someone. And kind of understanding what made him, shaped him. The Marine Corps took four years of my life and changed me and moulded me in their pattern and writing Jarhead was taking those back and having ownership of them."
He is as honest about his family as he is about his own responses to war and being a soldier. He wrote about his sister's battles with mental illness and his battles with trying to come to terms with having a military man for a father. His father's service in Vietnam "clouded" his childhood, he says. "And my childhood was kind of darkened and discoloured by that; by the darkness of my father."
He says his family "were fine" with what he wrote but it doesn't matter what people think. "If it mattered then I wouldn't have written a book in the first place. If it matters you shouldn't write. You should go sell insurance."
He is not prepared to be quite so probing in an interview. His relationship with his father is interesting; there are interesting and difficult relationships with military fathers in Exit A. But ask him whether he likes his father and he balks. "Do I like my father? I love my father."
Which is not the question. "I like things about him. He's not my model for fatherhood and I would like to be a father one day. There are things about him that I would model but certainly not his overall fathering skills. I think that's all I'll say on the matter."
He doesn't want to be known as the guy who writes books about military life and Exit A is "first a love story, a story about a rebellion and later redemption and, in many ways the costs of war to the Japanese; to the marines in Vietnam."
In any case writers write about what they can observe and they write about the same things over and over. "What does John Updike write about? WASPS in Northeast America cheating on their wives and drinking too much whiskey."
Jarhead didn't make him rich but it has bought him the luxury of being able to write full-time. His next book will be about a veteran of the Iraq war. You can't write books about war without making a political statement. Jarhead is "angry; it's sometimes despairing. It's bleak and honest about the costs of war and, yeah, I think that's a political statement."
He lives, and writes, in his New York apartment and likes to cook for friends who tend not to be prose writers. "I try to stay away from writers. There are different kinds of writers - some less pretentious than prose writers."
The Observer said, "The military never lurks far beneath the surface" in Swofford. He doesn't describe himself that way, saying, "I'm not barking orders or anything."
He was interviewed in his socks which in almost anyone else would signal a relaxed approach. He is hardly that. He is an upright sort of person. He answers questions as he writes: to the point, without embellishment or parentheses. He does not detour and his face doesn't give anything away. Meeting him, you can reconcile the military man in the writer.
