Yesterday, I attended a reading and a workshop by Anthony Swofford, the author of Jarhead, at my University, the Western Connecticut State University. Swofford was a Gulf War veteran who wrote the best selling book that also became a movie of the same title.

At the workshop, he tried to break down the process he went through in writing the book. It was pretty the same process that all memoirists go through.

Swofford said that “If you are writing a memoir and you’re worried about what a particular person might think, that is the person you should be writing about – for or against.”

Swofford restated the maxim: Real writing comes in revisions. Ernest Hemingway put it more bluntly. “The first draft of anything is shit,” the legendary author said.

“The main reason I became a writer was that I had no other skills,” Swofford said. He had failed at several jobs after returning from Iraq, including as a bank teller where he constantly could not account for money missing from his station at the end of the day.

“I am not mad. I am not well, but I am not mad. I’m after something. Memory, yes. A reel. More than just time. Years pass. I’ve been working toward this-I’ve opened the ruck and now I must open myself.” – Anthony Swofford wrote in Jarhead.

Writing any memoir is about opening oneself. It is more revealing when the person writing the memoir has passed through a traumatic experience.

Anthony Swofford passed through one of the most traumatic experiences of life- a combatant in a war.

Some things are constant in any war. The most important of them all is destruction. It destroys the winners and the losers. It destroys the participants gravely. When all is said and done, the casualties stretch from the warfront to thousands of miles away. War destroys not just the people and the environment but also ideas, including the very idea that propelled the combatant into war. Some participants are often left at a loss as to what is and what isn’t.

Anthony Swofford’s experience was not different. “What follows is neither true nor false but what I know,” he wrote.

It is the same experience and the same sentiment with past chroniclers of war professed. For instance, David Eggers memoir for Sudan’s Lost Boy, Valentino is called, “What Is The What” and Ishmael Beah of Sierra Leone called his “A Long Way Gone.”

Whether it is a child forced into combat or a young man who volunteered, there experience seemed to be no difference in how they perceive war and what war does to them.

The central piece of a warrior’s experience can be summarized thus: war is pointless even for the heroes who are more often scared than they are strong. When they are not bored waiting to fight they are frightened to death doing the fighting. The battlefield has a way of bringing out the beast in the most innocent of us.

Of recent, accounts of wars have shied away from its glorification. In most honest documentations, there seem to be a tiny line between a solider and a sociopath.

While I sympathized with Swofford, I think he pushed his disapproval too far. He wrote,

“None of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, , not on the field of battles, not for the man who fight the battle – the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street.”

The truth is that there is the intrinsic reward that Swofford is not seeing. The reward of the victory his grandfather and his father achieved in their services in the military preserved and protected the freedom he enjoyed as a young man before it was time for him to fight for the preservation of the same freedom for a new generation of Americans.

And that new generation may include his children.

I mentioned this later observation to Mr. Swofford after his reading from a new book he is working on. His answer was that it was just a marine’s grunt.

Swofford’s advice to upcoming writers was to read and read and read. “Writers must be part of society and still not be part of it,” he said. Writers must be able to pull away and critique his society.

I am on track.