A 'JARHEAD' IS a US Marine, so named because his head looks like a jar, with his scalp completely shaved on the back and sides, leaving only a flat, no 1 buzz-cut circle on top. Anthony Swofford was a jarhead, a lance corporal in a Marine sniper platoon, a third-generation soldler, and at the age of twenty he served in what will soon be known as the 'First' Gulf War. I urge you to buy this book. As we all know, while our leaders, men with soft hands, bicker about whether or not to fight, thousands of jarheads are back. in the very same sands where Swofford took part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm a dozen years ago and by the time you read this another war will probably already have begun. This book will tell you everything you need to know about what grunts and squaddies are enduring right now and what's on their minds. And furthermore, please get jarhead because it's an excellent book, certainly among the finest memoirs about soldiering I've read.

Swofford's formula is familiar and, in itself, the story is not original. Like many of his'predecessors, warriors who have swapped the gun for the pen, the author left the Marines and tried to move on after the war. But after 'many years of forgetting' and evidently many bottles of alcohol