Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Anthony Swofford: Discipline and commitment are essential to being a writer. You can’t be a writer unless you’re disciplined and you’re committed to the cause, which is like, write the script, write the book, write the sonnet, write the symphony. If you’re not disciplined, you can’t get those things done because there’s so much in the world that is telling you that it doesn’t have value, that you don’t have talent, that you’re never gonna get paid, that no one’s gonna care.

All those signals are out there. And you just have to not listen to them. 

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment.

Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Anthony Swofford, is an American writer and former US Marine best known for his memoir Jarhead, which details his experiences in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War as part of a surveillance and target acquisition scout sniper platoon.

He received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir for Jarhead, a feature film of Jarhead directed by Sam Mendez and featuring Jake Gyllenhaal playing Tony Swofford was released in 2005. Subsequent to his military service, Tony pursued writing, earning a BA from UC Davis and an MFA from the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop.

He’s taught at the University of Iowa, Lewis and Clark College, and currently Carnegie Mellon University. I’ve read Jarhead and watched the movie multiple times and can tell you Tony’s story is as harrowing as it is darkly Funny. I was blown away by the depths of Tony’s beautifully written, dare I say, poetic telling of such a deeply personal nerve wracking experience.

I’ve also read another of Tony’s memoirs, Hotels, Hospitals and Jails, which is an equally wild ride through his personal and family life, especially dealing with his ailing father who was trying to maintain his boisterous lifestyle as his body was failing him. Both books are brilliantly written. I highly recommend them to you as well as his novel, Exit A.

Tony has also published fiction and nonfiction in numerous major publications, including The New York Times and Harper’s. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great honor for me to welcome the extraordinarily gifted writer, Anthony Swofford, the story beat today. Tony, I’m so glad to have you on the show today.

Anthony Swofford: Thanks for having me, Steve. Really, really happy to talk. 

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s such a pleasure. So first of all, I’m sure you’ve heard this many times, but I must say it, thank you for your service to our country. I greatly appreciate it. 

Anthony Swofford: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for saying so. 

Steve Cuden: It, it truly. So let’s go back in time just a little bit.

As a young boy, which came first, thinking about being in the military or thinking about storytelling?

Anthony Swofford: they were, uh. They nearly coincided probably my, my, in the years of about 12 to 14, probably the, the first time I saw my father cry was when he was at his brother’s grave site in Georgia. And that brother had, uh, Billy had been a Marine and he died in a fluke.

Uh, he had the coolest marine gig ever. He was an embassy guard in Copenhagen in the sixties. Oh, wow. And probably having the time of his life. Sure. He was a good Baptist boy from. Georgia, but um, I’m sure he was enjoying. The life that one would’ve had. Uh, he got some funky flu and died from it. And, uh, he, he was my dad’s immediate younger brother and probably the, the, the sibling that was probably meant the most to him.

At any rate, you know, I, I saw my father weep, uh, at his grave. Billy’s portrait, uh, was up in my grandparents’ house in Georgia. It’s now here in my office, his Marine Corps, uh, portrait. And that was powerful for me. I didn’t really know why. But there was also, um, the, the, the cloud of Vietnam that kinda lived over my father, his service in Vietnam that lived over my father and somewhat lived over our household.

And so I think I was trying to put those things together and that had to do, you know, for, for my father at least. With military service, kind of like the ideas of masculinity, uh, service and sacrifice and duty. And right about that time I read Steinbeck’s of Mice and Men mm-hmm. And, uh, as many middle schoolers do and, and Cannery Row.

It was like the dipt tick of, of Steinbeck books that one would read. Right? And, uh, we, we would always go to Cannery Row in Monterey. And, uh, after having read John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row where drinking and, um, women of ill repute play pretty heavily, uh, we were sitting there and there was cotton candy and all of the, you know, the, the trappings of, of 1984 Cannery Row.

And I realized that John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Moved me much more than this cannery road that I was standing in experiencing. And, and that was the first time that I realized that the power of prose and the power of storytelling, and, and that was the first time I thought, oh, maybe I wanna be a writer.

And I didn’t know what that would be. Didn’t know really what that looked like, but it seemed like a way to, to make a mark in the world. And I didn’t really know. I, you know, I was an okay athlete, wasn’t a great student. I didn’t know how else I was gonna make a mark in the world. Well, it’s interesting to me that you, 

Steve Cuden: uh, found Steinbeck at that time because now that I think about it, I didn’t equate the two as I was reading your books, but there’s steinbeck’s really a heavily influenced in there.

Anthony Swofford: Yeah. I think in his prose in, in the, in the, in the power of his prose, uh, the simplicity of it, um, the sort of pure. Power and adrenaline of his, of his storytelling. Mm-hmm. I wouldn’t have been able to say those things at 14. I just knew that these, these characters in his books felt very alive and, and very real to me.

And they were also a place where I could kind of escape. Those books were a visceral experience for you. You felt them in your. I sure did. And I still have my, um, I still have the copy of, uh, on that trip, you know, I’d read, I’d read Cannery Row, and on that trip my paternal grandmother, uh, bought me a copy at a little gift shop there.

It was that, that, um, signe paperback version that cost like $2 95 cents Sure. At a gift shop in, in, in Monterey in 84. And I still have that. So, so at the same 

Steve Cuden: time that you were reading this, you were then attending your uncle’s. Funeral and that’s what triggered you to think about being in the military, not your father’s service.

Anthony Swofford: No, sorry, it wasn’t his funeral. It was, uh, he died in the, he died in, uh, 1967. 

Steve Cuden: Oh, oh, oh, 

Anthony Swofford: yeah. Sorry. So it was at his grave site. Oh, I’m sorry. You said it and 

Steve Cuden: I, I misunderstood it at his grave site. But that, that’s what inspired you to go into the service then, was. Was that not your father’s 

Anthony Swofford: service? Not so much my father’s.

Um, although certainly I, I wanted to sort of untangle that mystery. I knew, I knew, like the thing that, um, you know, he didn’t like talking about Vietnam. Every summer a guy he’d served with would come by the house. I, I think, I think the gentleman lived somewhere in the Midwest. He’d pass through California.

They’d go out by the pool. With a six pack of Budweiser and some cigars and talk, and there was just something mysterious about like whatever was happening there between those two men, which I was never invited into. I wanna understand what that was. Mm-hmm. So it was more like, uh, probably mood and tone that I was trying to figure out.

Steve Cuden: Well, we’re gonna talk more about mood and tone in your writing ’cause it’s very powerful the way that you get to tone in your work. Um, you’ve always been a reader then. If you were reading Steinbeck as a teenager, you were reading not the simplest stuff. That was a little more complex. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah. Maybe a little more complex.

I mean, yeah. I, I was a solid C minus student in, in all areas. Other than, other than, you know, what we used to call English and I, I excelled there. Um, I understood language. I think I understood the power of language. I was, I was like the family joker. I could get people to laugh. Uh, I think I could, you know, I told, I told a lot of lies too.

And, you know, all writers I know are great liars. And so, you know, I, I, I could spin a yarn, I guess. And my father was a great storyteller too. He had a facility with language. He was a, you know, southern guy with a, with a beautiful accent. And, and, and he liked telling stories. And I, I learned something about sort of oral storytelling and making things up from him.

Did you start to write as a teenager too? Were you already into that as something to do? No, I wasn’t as a teenager, I, I don’t think I had, uh, confidence in myself. I, I, I was still a reader and then I didn’t try to, I, I started, you know, keeping scant journals when I was in the Marine Corps. What do you mean by scant journals?

What does that mean? Oh, just like a really bad absurdist poem here or there. And then sort of like, you know, so-and-so’s being an asshole today and, you know, this life sucks. It’s, you know. So you weren’t 

Steve Cuden: taking, you weren’t taking notes in the Marines knowing you were gonna write a book, 

Anthony Swofford: were you? No, no. I wasn’t knowing, no, not at all.

But enough, you know, and I have a couple of those. They were essentially like my, my operation journals that I had also just write notes in. Maybe, you know, time date stamps, where we were, what was going on, um, but not thinking, oh yeah, this will make a great book someday. Mm-hmm. I was only thinking, you know, at war, like, shit, I just wanna live.

I would imagine that’s true. 

Steve Cuden: What age were you when you went into the service? 

Anthony Swofford: I was 18. I, I turned, uh. I turned 18 in August and I, I joined the Marine Corps in December of 1980, and by 19 you were in the Middle East? I turned 21 about four days after we 

Steve Cuden: landed in Saudi Arabia. Got it. Okay. So at what point did you, and you’re only taking what you call scant journals while you’re in service, what time did you start to write them?

When did you say to yourself, you know what, I’m gonna do this and be serious about it? When I, 

Anthony Swofford: when I, uh, when I left the Marine Corps, I, you know, my, I, my, my first classes were at, uh, this, uh, community college in Sacramento, in, in the neighborhood I grew up in called American River College. And I had, I had the great fortune of studying, uh, with this, uh, gentleman named Harold Schneider, who’s still the very best, uh, writing teacher I’ve ever had.

Hmm. Nice. He took me aside, he read some of my poems and he took me aside and he said, um, these aren’t great, but. Maybe you have something here. Go read these a hundred books and I, I think I can teach you how to read like a writer, which is what you need to do first. Interesting. How does one read like a writer?

Well, you. Attempt to understand what a writer is doing on every page. Mm-hmm. Uh, and you, so, so like, um, Martin Namo, I think it’s in his intro to Saal Bell’s, uh, Raulstein, he says that when we read a book, a, a page of Saal Beo, you know, a general reader, um, we’re just in the story, we’re following it. And when saw Bella looks at that page, he thinks about the hundred decisions that he had to make on that page.

So I think you have to read as a decision maker, sort like as a director, really. Right? And it’s about problem solving. So if you can start to sort of like reverse engineer how a writer has made a book that’s reading like a writer. I 

Steve Cuden: think that, that’s quite beautifully said. I, I’ve never thought of it quite the way you said it, and then I think that that’s really true.

You have to read like, how would I do this? Or how can I make it mine? Or better, or however you’re thinking. Uh, and for you, you’re getting that off of, um, getting it from your, your professors and he says, go read like a writer. And you, you’ve always been a reader though, haven’t you? That’s not, wasn’t new 

Anthony Swofford: to you.

No. Yeah, reading wasn’t new to me. Um, I didn’t read a whole lot in the Marine Corps, you know, uh, weren’t a lot of books around. My mom sent me, uh, the Stranger and Macbeth and another copy of Cannery Rowe when I was deployed to, uh, you know, to the war. And so I kind of lived with those. I love ke, you know, I love the stranger.

I loved the the dark existential philosophy and. That’s sort of where I lived, where my mind lived. Um, but I knew that, you know, that I needed to, uh, I needed to be around people who were also anxious to learn. And, and, and I wouldn’t have said like, I got outta the Marine Corps. And, uh, I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do.

I knew I wanted to go to college. My, I lived with my mom for the first couple months. Her, across the street neighbor was a woman who was a president of a bank. She’s still also a friend of mine. She gave me my first job at her bank. I was the worst bank teller ever. My, my drawer was always short. She covered me.

Um, but, uh, you know, I should have been fired like 10 times. But, um, she gave me a loan for a shitty truck. And, uh, you know, I, I, I did that for the first couple years when I got outta the Marine Corps. While going to, while going to school. 

Steve Cuden: So while you’re in school, you’re starting to write, and I have to assume that you started to like it and you started to think you were decent at it.

At what point, as you’re writing, whether then or later did you say to yourself, you know what? I am pretty good as a writer and I’m gonna try to make some kind of go at this to get published. 

Anthony Swofford: You know, I, I won this, uh, the, the best a hundred bucks I ever made as a writer. I, uh, I won a, uh, Cal Poly Pomona, had this, uh, community college, uh, writing contest statewide for California.

And, uh, and I won the, the poetry contest. 

Steve Cuden: Wow. 

Anthony Swofford: You know, I wanna say 1997, you know, I got a hundred bucks for it. I flew down there, you know, I spent 200 bucks flying down to LA flying me and my girlfriend down there, and I went to this prize winner event, and I don’t know, it was fucking cool. I, I, you know, I read my poem up there, there were professors and readers from another place who didn’t know me, who said this poem had, you know, had some juice that, that made me think like, maybe, you know, I do have some talent.

Um, I transferred right after that to uc Davis. I lucked out just having great mentors. I don’t know if it was. Because they thought I might have some talent, or, you know, they thought I was a psychopath or what. But I had, uh, this, this great, uh, writer named Jack Hicks who was at uc Davis for a long time, uh, writer named Catherine Vase, who, um, was there for a couple years.

I just happened to luck out having her as my mentor there. Yeah, I, I just got support and, and people telling me, you know, to keep doing it, to not stop. Yeah. And you were enjoying it enough to keep doing it then? 

Steve Cuden: That was 

Anthony Swofford: part, yeah, I, I did. Yeah. Yeah. I, you, I love, I loved writing. I rode every day. I, you know, do you still, I worked 40 the hour a week job in a frozen foods warehouse in West Sacramento.

Um, worked like five to 1:30 PM got off, drank beer at the Exxon, uh, with my buddies until like four, you know, slept for three hours and went to, went to campus. But I. I was around like working in that food Frozen foods warehouse. There are a bunch of Vietnam vets. They were Teamsters and Longshoremen, a lot of Vietnam vets.

Uh, a lot of just like real people, you know, like, um, guys who’d seen some shit, guys who worked their asses off. To support their families and support themselves. And so I couldn’t be, uh, I couldn’t be precious there, you know? ’cause they would just call me college boy and professor and, you know, they, they just fucked with me.

’cause I was the guy who was like going to uc Davis, so that I gained no respect from them. I, I did. But they never showed it. Right, right, right. But I could tell, like, there were a couple of ’em who would pull me aside and they would say like, get the fuck out of this place. Go do something. Because they, they knew that that was dead end for them, but they knew you could go somewhere with it.

Sure. Yeah. And they, you know, they were guys around my dad’s age and they, uh. You know, they, they didn’t want their own kids to work in a frozen foods warehouse. You know, they, they were busting their asses so their own kids could become doctors and lawyers and Sure. Do, do Are you still writing every day?

No. God no. I wish, um, I try to write a couple days a week, you know, uh, time is the writers, uh, greatest resource. Mm-hmm. And the resource, um, that many writers lack. You know, for me, I’ve got three awesome kids. Uh, I spend a lot of time with them. Uh, that’s a lot more fun than writing, I guarantee. That’s right.

It’s, it’s more rewarding, but I’m trying to set my life up now where I can, you know, if I could, if I can set it up. In the next year where I, I can write four days a week, I think I’ll be, I’ll be really happy with that. I’ll, and I’ll be productive. So do you, are you still writing poetry as well? Uh, every once in a while I write, I, you know, I, I’m an insomniac, so I’m up at three 30 and I have a great idea for a poem and I.

I bang it out and then I forget that it’s on my laptop. 

Steve Cuden: Well, so what do you think of yourself primarily as a, as, as a poet, as a memoirist, as a novelist, as a short article writer, what, how do you think of yourself? Or is it just all of the above or something else? 

Anthony Swofford: Uh, I think it’s just lowercase writer. I have stories I want to tell, and I try to find the best medium to tell them.

For years I’ve been trying to crack a Sacramento cop story. So I wrote a feature, wrote some pages of novel with, with a, with a writer director, great friend of mine named or Moverman, you know, sold a pilot to HBO about a cop in Sacramento, and I just was never able to crack it. So, um, I think the, the content guides me in terms of form and and genre.

I’m working on a novel, uh, I’m working on a book of nonfiction. I’m working on a novel that’s sort of about academia and marriage and tennis and religion and, um, I’m working on a book of nonfiction that’s about bad feet and about bad feet, bad. I have bad feet, so, uh, and I’m working on, you know, a couple, couple feature scripts.

So, so when you say 

Steve Cuden: you couldn’t crack the cop story in Sacramento, crack it as a novel or crack it as a feature or series. Well, I never 

Anthony Swofford: cracked it, I guess, you know, I, I wrote a feature that I thought was really good and then, you know, no one liked, no one wanted it. It was about this dude who, uh, went around and whacked like nine people on September 10th, 2001.

And, um, okay. And I, I, I called it, you know, the last true serial killer because he thought he was gonna be famous and he woke up, you know, well, he was dead. But, you know, the morning of September 11th, 2001, no one gave a shit that some guy had whacked, like nine people in Sacramento the night. Well, that’s such a, that’s a great idea, but it’s a pretty fucking idea.

But maybe it’s just a bad script. That could be it. 

Steve Cuden: By the way, what we call that when you aren’t able to sell it, we just call it Hollywood. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, yeah. 

Steve Cuden: Nobody can sell a script in Hollywood, so don’t, don’t feel the least bit bad about it. ’cause nobody can, you know? I know, I know. What we don’t hear about are all of the scripts that didn’t sell by even the famous people or the famous directors or famous writers.

We don’t hear about those. Yeah. We only hear about the ones they actually get through, which are. A fewer number than what they’ve written. So, you know, that’s, that’s just the way it is. So I noticed in your two books, because I haven’t read everything you’ve written, but I’ve read two of your books, um, there were themes in there that are intense and big.

You’re a very intense writer. Um, and there are themes in your work about war and drinking and sex, comradery, death. Love and other human challenges. What draws you to those themes? They’re kind of really heavy and intense. Well, I’ve probably been drawn 

Anthony Swofford: to them since I, since puberty, I guess. Um, be because I knew my father had been in combat and, and, and lived in sort of the harshest depths of violence and, and had seen, you know, the most horrible things that humans do to other humans.

And, and that he was haunted by that. I, I wanted to understand violence. Mm-hmm. Um, and, uh, sex, because, you know, sex, William Gas has this great quote where he says, uh, sex is the first reason we read and the only reason we write. That’s, 

Steve Cuden: if you think about that’s true. Frank Capra once famously said, all stories are love stories.

Anthony Swofford: Yeah. I believe they are. I, I, I, I totally agree with Capra on that. They’re, they’re, they’re multitudes of kinds of love, right? But they all, you know, if they’re powerful, love is, love is the key. 

Steve Cuden: So, so if you come at it from the perspective that all stories are stories of someone wanting something badly and running into conflict to try to get to a resolution to their goal, if you think of it that way, it doesn’t have to be romantic love.

It can be the love of the pursuit. It can be the love of something that you want. It’s so. That’s why they’re all love stories. I think he was very spot on when he said that. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, sure. It can be love of, of a sport, love of, um, absolutely. You could be love of 

Steve Cuden: war. It could be love of war. Uh, but you are, you focus quite a bit on sex and women and the pursuit of them and.

That’s clearly a big part of your upbringing, your background, and you’ve written a lot about it. I’m assuming most of it’s true. If not all of it, it’s not made up, 

Anthony Swofford: right? Uh, it’s it’s not made 

Steve Cuden: up. No. No, it’s not made up. And, and so, so, okay, let me tell you why I asked this. I’ve written a ton of stuff that has nothing to do with my life.

Obviously, things about me leak in just because that’s the nature of writing, but I’ve never written anything. I’ve never written a memoir and I’ve never written about myself or my own personal story. Not in any way that anyone’s ever, uh, seen or read or produced, but you’ve written at least two solid memoirs.

And so that attracted you to talk about yourself. I am curious what drew you to write about yourself or to expose yourself to the world in that way? 

Anthony Swofford: Well, it was probably my, um, I don’t know, you know, it, it was the easiest thing to write about, frankly. My teacher, uh, professor, mentor friend, Chris Offit, Kentucky writer, um, my, my first semester at Iowa, he was my, he was my professor.

It was his first, the first semester he was teaching there after he graduated from there, like a decade earlier. And he, he has this great thing he says like, you know, you have to find your crutches. Like, you know, like it’s a bitch to write. So that is if writing about, if you can write well about sex and you wanna lean in, then just write well about sex and, you know, make it new and make people wanna read it.

Or if you know, you can write about yourself, I, you know, I, I call, I do call myself a reluctant memoirist. It took me a while to get there. I didn’t write write a memoir. Um, I wrote 13 short stories. In graduate school for my thesis, um, you know, pretty good stories, not great. Most of them were published over the years.

Um, wrote a couple hundred pages of a novel that was set in the Gulf War, but it just wasn’t clicking, uh, until the, the only part of that 200 pages that like really worked was the 200 pages that were totally autobiographical. Hmm. So, I, you know, I can’t totally, um. Unpack or give you like the perfect reason why I, uh, reverted to memoir writing, you know, for those two books.

But it was, I guess at the time, the most visceral and the most expedient writing that I was doing. It sounds to me it’s what 

Steve Cuden: poured outta you that you, you needed to say. Uh, and frequently that’s what takes a writer’s attention is, I gotta say this now. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah. And I, I, I needed to say it as a young Marine, I knew and, and then as like a non marine outside of the world, I knew that generals and politicians, uh, wrote most of the books and told most of the history of wars and warfare.

And I also knew that they didn’t tell the stories. Of young men and women like me, mostly young men ’cause I was a Marine Corps grunt. Uh, they did not tell the stories of, you know, a working class kid from Sacramento who’s, you know, most of his friends went off to college and got married and were living lives and went over and was sucking sand.

I’m pretty sure he was gonna die. Uh, those stories weren’t told none and those books hadn’t come out of the Gulf War. And, um, I wanted to write that story. Uh, I knew that story was important and. I wanted to etch my name in some window pane of history, and it happened when I started writing about, when I started writing my own story.

My, my, my prose was most strong. I was, uh, writing with most clarity, the most meaning, and probably, um, the most, the most artful writing that I’d done to that point. 

Steve Cuden: Well, I think you nailed that right on the head. It’s, your book is incredibly artful and it doesn’t need to be though. That’s the way you wrote it.

In other words, you could have written it like a, you know, meat and potatoes reporter would write it, but you didn’t. You wrote it with this heart and with this soul and it, it’s very artful in the writing and your analysis of things is extremely artistic. Um, so it, while we’re on it, you know, it’s amazing that you survived to tell your tale.

That’s the first. Amazing thing. Um, tell the listeners who may not know about Jarhead a little bit more about what transpires in the book. 

Anthony Swofford: Well, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a building’s room and really it’s, um, a kid from approximately the age of 14 to 22, uh, kind of lost, you know, uh, dad’s a little vacant.

Parents are getting divorced. He, you know, I, I’m not sure what I wanna do with my life. Uh, got a couple of knucklehead buddies who decide they’re gonna join the Marine Corps. They talked me into it. Um, I, and, and then also it, it’s key here that my father was, was extremely, totally, completely opposed to me joining the Marine Corps.

’cause he knew, because he knew he did not want me to join the Marine. He didn’t want me to join any branch of the military. Um, he certainly didn’t want me to join the Marine Corps ’cause, you know, he didn’t want me to die. Good reason, but of course, yeah. I was a 17-year-old kid and he was divorcing my mom and I was pissed.

And so I was like, okay, well I’m gonna do it, you know, you know, I tell this story in Jarhead, you know, when you go to the military, they, they, you go to these things called MEP station. I don’t military entry processing stations, probably what it stands for, but the, the one that I had to go to was in Oakland.

I lived in Sacramento. My dad drove me to Oakland, but he did a little dog leg over to Travis Air Force Base where I was born, and he pulled up to the hospital and he was just like, this is where you were born. And I was like, okay man, get me to the fucking Marine Corps, you know? But yeah, it was like that was an act of love on his part.

Like remember, please son, that like this is where you came into this world and you know, I don’t want you to go out in a body bag. 

Steve Cuden: That’s, that is an act of love because he was concerned ’cause he knew exactly what you’d be up against. He, he could, he couldn’t have possibly known, I don’t think that you’d be at war in the Middle East, I assume.

No, 

Anthony Swofford: certainly not. It was, it was, uh, what, December, 1988. So, well, well before, but yo, uh, he was not a, an educated man, but he was, um, smart enough to know that chances are. You know, there’s a pretty good chance that every 10 to 15 years, 20 years Max America is going to send young people off to fight and die, and that clock was ticking.

Yeah. Well, 

Steve Cuden: and of course obviously it did happen. I’m wondering how important you think being a Marine and learning what you learned as a Marine, uh, mainly about discipline and how to handle yourself, how that has impacted your ability to be a writer. How has that your service worked its way, not in the storytelling, but in the, the process of being a writer?

How has that helped you? 

Anthony Swofford: Or has it? Oh, I think, I think it absolutely helped. I think it’s essential to me being a writer. I don’t, I, I don’t think, if I, if I hadn’t gone to the Marine Corps, I don’t think I’d be a writer. I, I would’ve wanted to be a writer, probably would’ve written some bad books and kept them in a shelf somewhere.

Gone to some writing work, retreats here and there. Um, and, and never had a book. Yeah, the discipline, the idea of mission and sort of mission completion is, is like essential to how, you know, a young person is essentially rebranded. You know, one morning my mom was making me a cheese omelet and then the next morning a guy was cursing in my face, calling me the most despicable names.

I was re I. That was the rebranding. Yeah. That part of that rebranding was, was the idea of discipline and commitment. And, and discipline and commitment are essential to being a writer like you. You can’t be a writer unless you’re disciplined and you’re committed to the cause, which is like, write the script, write the book, write the sonnet, you know?

The symphony, like if you’re not disciplined, you can’t get those things done because there’s so much in the world that is telling you that it doesn’t have value, that you don’t have talent, that you’re never gonna get paid, that no one’s gonna care. Uh, all those signals are out there and you just have to not listen to them and believe in your talent.

Trust in your hard work, which is wrapped up in discipline. Well, there’s 

Steve Cuden: no question. Most writers, no matter how good they are, never make any money at it. Never actually make a living at it. So, uh. The idea of doing it anyway, despite that is what separates the, the non-writer or the unsuccessful writers from the real writers, which are people who write.

They write despite the fact that they don’t know whether they’re ever gonna get paid for it. So what did you spend most of your time on while developing the book? You said you didn’t really keep journals during the war. How did you remember it all? What did you do to develop the book? 

Anthony Swofford: Well, I, um. When I, when I was working on, uh, that the novel in grad school, I spent a lot of time in the stacks at the University of Iowa Library.

Rand had like a 20 volume series on the, on the Gulf War, and I took out all those books, put them in a shopping cart. I walked into my, my house and, um, uh, at the time I, it was my first marriage and I was married to a poet and I had this beautiful office, the most beautiful office I’ve ever had in a, in a cool house in Iowa City.

And, um, you know, I just spent six months like reading about the war, reading every bit of journalism that’s written about it, reading after action reports. Um. Because I was a grunt with you, like getting sand in my face every day. I didn’t see like the large scale political, um, you know, atmosphere. I didn’t know that we’d get newspapers every once in a while.

We’d listen to the BBC. Um, so we knew a bit, but um, I needed to essentially like learn, um, the macro of the war and understand it. Before I could build my micro bit of it. And then for me, uh, when I finally was like, okay, fuck, I guess I’m gonna write a memoir, which was like a dirty word to me. Why? Wait, wait, why?

Why was that a dirty word? I’m curious. ’cause you know, ’cause I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to write the Great American novel. Ah. Ah, okay. And, um, I thought memoir was, you know, just kind of a cop out and I still do. 

Steve Cuden: You wrote a very good cop out. Thanks. Thanks. 

Anthony Swofford: Then for, for me, uh, like the act of writing is, is is also like the act of thinking and also in memoir, I, I, I would prefer to use the word autobiography, I guess, um, because it’s more autobiography than memoir, but it’s an, the, the act of writing is an active memory retrieval.

Yes. And like moving into these spaces. So a lot of the rough writing was simply writing scenes, writing events. And then at the time, I had a super cool office in Portland, Oregon that I paid $200 a month for, uh, in a little building called the similar building that had the only, um, manually operated elevator in Portland at the time.

It was an awesome office. And, uh, I had an area I just, that I just called Free Swim. And it was one, one wall where I would just, I, I would write on, um, uh, like six by 10 cards and I would write a scene heading. I would just like pin it to the wall, and so I knew those were things that I could go back to.

So that became sort of like my memory field in a way that I, that I could return to. Is 

Steve Cuden: that how you structured the book by putting up pinning up story, ideas and scenes? 

Anthony Swofford: I did, I did. I figured that, I figured the structure out. I, I probably had 125. Pages at least when, when I realized that I, that I was essentially working with what I called tiles.

You know, so I was, I, I was working with tiles and one tile was boyhood, one tile was Marine Corps ethos and mythos, uh, one tile was Marine Corps training. One tile was combat, and the, the fifth tile was post-war life. And so once I realized that those were the. The tiles that I was working with, then I then I could like work on a tile and not worry about like what was next.

And then the next, the task of really like making the book work over probably like 12 drafts was, that was about timing. Because there’s no mystery. This kid went to war, he lived, so you’re not, you’re not like, oh, is he gonna die? Like, you know, he is left. Right. So, right. So the, the pressure and the tension and the conflict in the book comes from essentially cuts, you know, and, and, and movements between tiles 

Steve Cuden: and your interaction with your fellow marines.

There’s a lot of conflict there. 

Anthony Swofford: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. That conflict is, is. All over those pages, power pages in my conflict with the Marine Corps. Like what has the Marine Corps made me, what will I be when I leave? Um, I was not this human, uh, on December 14th, 1988. Who the fuck am I gonna be on December 15th, 1992 when I wanna become a college student?

And so, so those, those were the, the internal and the external conflicts that were, that are at play. 

Steve Cuden: Well, and you were dealing with real life and death. So that’s also highly conflicted. Uh, and, and the dangers that you were in at, at varying times, uh, you know, you were actually creating what came out of the early animation world.

You were creating a storyboard by putting that, by pinning those, uh, cards up. Tiles, as you call them, you were storyboarding your story and that’s how you created this outline, I guess you could call it. I find that very interesting. So you were, you were working in sequences and not necessarily in one overarching thing at any given time was, and that’s how you got to the hole.

It was absolutely sequence writing. Yep. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s fascinating that that made it easier for you because you were consuming smaller chunks, I assume. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, sure. And, and back to, um, Chris Offit advice to like, make the job as easy as you possibly can. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Anthony Swofford: And so when I figured out that structure, that that structure was the key to me telling the story, the key to having any power, that that was key to me figuring out the book.

Because like when you’ve written a hundred pages, you don’t know if you have a book. Like you might have a book, but you can write 200 pages and not have a book. I, I’d already done that, of course. So, um, of course. And, and I, and, and one reason that those 200 pages were not a book was because I had not figured out the structure.

You know, I was just like writing cool scenes about Marines after the war. Driving around America, you know, growing their hair along, smoking dope and having fun with girls. And that wasn’t a book. That’s why 

Steve Cuden: I, me personally, I like to outline. I like outlining because it tells me, is there a story here? Yes or no?

And you can figure it out from doing that rather than wasting all of your time writing hundreds of pages to find out you don’t have a story. The outline gives you that leg up. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah. Outlines are, 

Steve Cuden: are, are really 

Anthony Swofford: important. 

Steve Cuden: Well, some, there are writers that don’t use them and they succeed somehow. Yeah, I don’t understand.

I don’t either. I’ve talked to any number of writers on this podcast who don’t outline at all. They just go and I, I frankly don’t understand it. So now you, because you didn’t keep notes and now you say you went back and read a lot of material on the war in that era, in that time. You’re then dredging memories up for yourself.

Are you certain in your thinking at that moment as you’re writing that your memories are accurate? I’m, 

Anthony Swofford: I’m quite certain. Um, I did do some fact checking, like once I’d sold the book on about a hundred, a hundred or so pages, um, I wrote that book. Really? I wish I could write a book every eight months, but so I, I wrote the book in eight months.

Wow. And, um, that’s impressive. When I was done, uh. I reached out, I, I spoke to like four different guys, you know, that I was, that were in the unit and I, and I fact check a number of stories. Like there, there’s a story where this one, this one Marine is, uh, desk grad, a corpse with a entrenching tool, and I reached out to another marine, you know, because that’s sort of the most egregious kind of horrible thing that anyone that I.

Directly witness did. Right. And this, uh, this other guy was like, oh yeah, I remember that. And he told the story in like much greater detail, you know, than I did. And remembered more like crazy heinous things than I had. But, but I, I, I kept my version, but that was just like, oh yeah, yeah, that happened. So I’m gonna read a 

Steve Cuden: passage from the book.

It’s a little chunk, but it’s gonna take a second to do because I just wanted. Ask you in terms of being an autobiographical memoir or whatever you wanna call it, how difficult it was to get there. So you write in Jarhead, quote, I remember about myself, a loneliness and poverty of spirit, mental collapse, brief, jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion, discomforting, bodily pain, constant ringing in my ears.

Sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation fits of rage and despondency. Mutiny of the self lovers to whom I lied, lovers who lied to me. I remember going in one end and out the other. I remember being told I must remember, and then for many years, forgetting. That close quote to me, that’s poetry of the soul.

That’s you’re not being a reporter so much as you’re coming out of the depths of your guts, and the book overwhelmingly holds that same quality of writing. I am fascinated by this because again, I don’t know how to get there. How difficult was it for you to dig in and reveal that? 

Anthony Swofford: Like to find, to find that moment where I wrote that passage or to do that throughout the book?

Well, throughout the 

Steve Cuden: book, but both how, you know, how did, was it painful for you or were you trying to act like a reporter? 

Anthony Swofford: Uh, it was, it was both, you know, it could be both things simultaneously. Sometimes I was just trying to. Work and think as a reporter. And then other times, um, you know, I knew that it would be a crap book or not a book if I wasn’t just brutally honest about who I was as a young man and what my desires were.

You’re brutally honest and you know, you, you see right through those books right away. Uh, and they’re, they, they have no value, uh, when a writer is simply trying to, you know, impress the world with. Their, either their intelligence or, you know, uh, their looks or their emotional intelligence or, or, or whatever.

Like those books have no value to me. Those writers are, you know, they’re not writers, you know, they’re just, do they feel like 

Steve Cuden: charlatans to you? 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, sure. Like, yeah. If, if you care so much about your image that that’s what you’re writing, then it’s not a book. You know, no, no one’s gonna read that book in 10 years or 15 years, or I wanna write a book.

Yo, this sounds like grandiose. And I wanna write a book that, you know, someone would read in a hundred years. Like that was, that was my bar. If I couldn’t write a book that might possibly be read a hundred years later, then it wasn’t. Worth my time. 

Steve Cuden: I would like to think, of course, I won’t be here in a hundred years, but I’d like to think you’ve succeeded.

Um, you also write the True Friend from War is the friend who obliterates his own story by telling the stories of others. What does that mean? 

Anthony Swofford: Uh, I don’t know. That’s a good question. Um, like you wrote it. Well, I think there, I, I may have been trying to, um. I may have been trying to defend myself as the storyteller of my platoon.

Mm-hmm. And of my unit. It may have been like an olive branch of shorts because I knew I would get shit from Marines. You know, I knew that, that some people would say I was betraying the Marine Corps, that I was betraying the unit, that I was betraying the ethos. And it, it could have been me, um, defending myself before I was charged.

Defending yourself before you were charged. ‘

Steve Cuden: cause you knew you’d be charged. Yeah. Would you recommend to other writers to go through the process of allowing your own work to be adapted for the screen? 

Anthony Swofford: Oh yeah. Sure. Yeah. Why not? You know, mark Bowden, uh, black Hawk Down, you know, great writer wrote that amazing book about the Philadelphia Eagles.

Uh, many great books. But I was on a panel with him right when Jarhead came out. The book. At the LA Times book Fair. And, um, someone asked him what he thought about Black Hawk Down and he said, uh, it was the greatest 90 minute commercial for my book that could ever be made. There’s truth to 

Steve Cuden: that, isn’t there?

Yeah. But you also hear stories throughout the history of Hollywood, of writers who just become infuriated with how Hollywood has bungled what they think of as their baby. And I, I, I would like to think that you’ve, are you like Jarhead? Although you tell me, are you happy with the way that turned out?

Anthony Swofford: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I love Gerhardt. I think it’s a great film. I, I think that, um, bill Broyles, you know, amazing screenwriter. Mm-hmm. Sam Mendes, amazing director, top shelf actors, uh, made a, made a great movie that the sort of, um, emotional, metaphysical, artistic center of the book, uh, lives on the screen in what they did.

I lucked out. It doesn’t always happen that way, but when, right. You know, like I’ve been on plenty of panels where some writer starts complaining about Hollywood this and Hollywood that. I’m like, you cashed the fucking check. You know, like, like that’s the deal. Like that is the deal. Go away. They’re going to do something with it.

Um, there’s that New Yorker cartoon. I gotta track it down. I think I have before. But, uh, it’s like poolside two sort of corporeal gents in tuxedos, snacking on, uh, appetizers. And the caption says. The writer died, but we’re still trying to figure out how to screw him.

Well, he, that’s just, that’s the deal. Like, you know, so I, 

Steve Cuden: I, I will say from my own personal experience of decades in Hollywood, if you are a writer in Hollywood or trying to have your writing created through Hollywood in some way. You would be wise to think about it as a mercenary would going to war, take the money and move along, uh, and do your best, but don’t expect it to be, you know, the most wonderful experience or the most wonderful result.

Take the money. That’s what Hollywood is about. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, that’s, I mean, you do the contract, you sign it, you cash the check. Um, you’re not, you’re not a director. You’re not a screenwriter, you’re not an actor. Shut up and go away. Exactly right. Anytime I hear writers complaining about that, I just, I, I. I just wanna tell them to shut the fuck up.

Steve Cuden: So briefly, because, uh, we’re having a marvelous conversation about Jarhead, but I want to talk about hotels, hospitals, and jails as well. That I think would also make a hell of a movie totally different, a completely different thing, but I think it would make a hell of a movie. It’s a, it’s a road picture basically, and it’s two guys, a father and a son.

Wow. It’s just, wow. How long was it after you were in the Marines before you experienced what you wrote about in hotels, hospitals, and jails? 

Anthony Swofford: Uh, it was quite a while. It, it’s, um, mostly kind of post jarhead. I mean, the conflicted nature of my relationship with my father would sort of like, um, you know, it’d be on a low simmer for a while, then it’d be on a hot boil.

He, he was, he was somewhat erratic in, in his, uh. Erratic in his affections and, and, and, and erratic in his, uh, being there for me. Mm-hmm. You know, in my twenties and into my thirties, you know, he was dealing with his own stuff. My brother died, his first son, you know, my brother died when I was 28. My brother was 34.

I just fucking wrecked my dad. Like, you know, he was never the same. And, um, I kind of resented that, you know, I thought he should have like, uh, I don’t know, behaved differently around my brother’s death. But, but I get it now. I get it now. You know, I’m a father. Now, if one of my kids died, it would just fucking ruin me.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Anthony Swofford: But my dad and I figured it out. But, but the sort of, the, the bulk of the, the RV trips and the bulk of the conflict is, is probably like oh four. Probably over four, uh, six to eight years. And and how long did it take you to write that book? I wrote that book in, uh, lemme think I wrote that book in about 18 months.

And at that point you’d already written Jarhead, right? Jarhead came out in oh three. Uh, my novel exit A came out in oh seven and I was kind of looking, looking for a book, you know, like John McPhee says, looking for a ship. You know, my dad blasting around America in his rv. I was like, oh, that’s the ship, you know.

Let me, um. Let, let me tie onto that and, and, and see where it takes us. So at that point, were you taking notes? Were you keeping a journal of some kind? Um, I was definitely taking notes, uh, probably the last few trips we, we, we were on. Because at 

Steve Cuden: that point you were probably starting to think about a book, weren’t you?

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, and I, I was even sort of underway. I probably illegally recorded him a few times in, in the rv. 

Steve Cuden: Did he know you were thinking about turning it in that, that trip or your experiences into a book? 

Anthony Swofford: The last trip we took, which was, um, I think I flew to California and we drove out to Colorado Springs, or not Colorado Springs.

We, we drove to Aspen, uh, because I, I would participate in this, uh, this event where, uh, at Snowmass, at that mountain, this winter va winter sports clinic where they teach, uh, disabled vets how to ski. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Anthony Swofford: And, uh, I would teach a writing course there. And so, um, on that trip, my dad knew that I was writing, I, I just told him, I was like, you know, by the way.

I’m writing about all of this writing. But yeah, I have to give my dad credit. Like I, most male friends that I have, have some shit with their dads. Like I, I don’t know many that, that don’t, um, and a lot of them are, you know, writers and directors and artists and, and I, I don’t know if that just wanting to be a creative person in Klein view toward conflict with your father or what, but like many of them do.

And I have to give my dad a lot of credit because he. You know, he, I, I say it in the book, you know, he said his, his phrase is always like, get the venom out. Um, but he would say he had this beautiful Georgia draw, you know, he’d say, uh, you know, get the venom out. He called me Tone, get the venom out tone. Uh, and he said, you know, he was like, he was emotionally, he, he had a really high emotional iq.

He said, if you don’t, it will hurt you when I’m dead. 

Steve Cuden: Obviously I never and will never have a chance to meet him, but it seems to me that he was a very interesting character. He was a real character. 

Anthony Swofford: He was, he was a great storyteller. People love my dad. I mean, my friends, my friends loved my dad. Like my friends loved hanging out with my dad.

My friends loved going to a strip club with my dad, you know, like going to a bar with my dad 

Steve Cuden: because 

Anthony Swofford: you, 

Steve Cuden: you write in the book. 

Anthony Swofford: And 

Steve Cuden: again, a quote, for many years I had considered combat the only test of a man’s greatness. But I’d begun to understand that for me, fatherhood would be the real measure.

That’s what you’re talking about. Yes. 

Anthony Swofford: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and, and my father admitted it, you know, like my, my father did not achieve greatness as a father. Uh, he, he said that he wished he’d done better. He said he’d done the best he could. Um, he had a horrible childhood, you know, like, he, like serious like Georgia.

Poverty kind of stuff. Mm-hmm. That was dark and, and like southern gothic, um, he had beautiful siblings, you know, but, but, uh, the parental unit in his home wa wasn’t great. And so he did do the best he could and, and I, I was able to forgive him. And there, I, and that’s, I, I say that and I’m like, I don’t know that I had to forgive him.

Like, why? I don’t know that I needed to forgive him. I just needed to, I think he just needed me to say like, that’s okay, dad. And, and that’s what I, you know, that’s what I said. Do you think 

Steve Cuden: that ha, having written Jarhead, which is a memoir or a, or an autobiography or however you wanna call it, and then ho Hotels, hospitals, and jails, do you think that your purging the, these emotions is, is that part of the process to get it out of you?

Anthony Swofford: No, it never go. It, it’s, it’s never out. I think I’m, you know, I, uh, you used the word mercenary earlier. I’m like, I’m a writer. I need content. I need something that’s powerful. Okay. That’s there, it’s in my lap. You know, there’s a, there’s like, Joan Didion says, you know, writers are constantly selling people out.

And, and I, I like to say that, um, memoirs are constantly selling themselves out. Mm-hmm. If you’re not, then you’re not. Then you’re writing a weak book. That’s 

Steve Cuden: very interesting. So it requires a certain degree of courage and bravery to go in there and actually be very, um, tough and detailed in what you’re doing.

You can’t be namby-pamby about it. No, you can’t. You can’t. It’ll show. It’ll show. It absolutely will show. Well, I have been having just this fascinating conversation for an hour now with um, Anthony Swofford, Tony Swafford, and we’re gonna wind the show down a little bit. And I’m just wondering, and all of the experiences you’ve had, which are many and quite fascinating, and, um.

Interesting. Uh, I’m wondering if you’re able to share with us an experience that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat strange, or just plain funny more than what you’ve already shared with us. 

Anthony Swofford: Well, I, I probably have about 40 of those. Um, I bet you do some of them not, uh, you know, not, not for, uh, primetime television, but, so I was, uh, a couple years back, I, I was, uh, developing a TV show with this great writer and producer named Chris Morgan.

Fast and furious. You know, good dude, solid dude, great writer. And, uh, he’s on the universal lot and so I’m, I go there all the time for meetings. Drive from Santa Monica, had this little 2006 p Green Prius and um, which I loved. My wife sold it without telling me to. I was, I was brokenhearted when we lost that car.

But, um, so Chris’s bungalow was right next to the rocks bungalow. And, um, I, I’d go by, I never, and there was this placard that said the rock parking only, you know, in like red. I never saw a car there. Yeah. I’ve been to the, I’ve been to the bungalow like 20 times. One time I was late, I was like, fuck it. The rock’s not gonna park here.

Like I park in the spot, right? I go over to Chris’s bungalow, which is like right around the corner. I was sweating and running late. We’re in their meeting about 20 minutes in, you know, his fun rings. His, his assistant, she’s like, um, so, uh, someone’s parked in the rock spot and, um, they said they think someone came into our bungalow.

It’s this little, it’s like a green Prius. And I was like, oh fuck.

And Chris is like, Hey, we gotta move your fucking car, man. It’s the rock. You know? So I run out. And like sure as, shit, there’s the rock sitting in like a Panama GT three or something like that, like waiting for the jerk who parked his Prius in his spot, you know? What did he say to you? He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t, I just waved. I was like, sorry, rock, you know, jumped in my little Prius and then had to find another parking spot. But, uh, the one 

Steve Cuden: day, the one day he shows up. 

Anthony Swofford: Because it’s like he’s gotta be shooting a movie somewhere or doing some cool shit somewhere. Like he’s not gonna be, you know, I’m a lot 

Steve Cuden: So you got away with it, in other words, 

Anthony Swofford: I got, yeah, I, I, the rock didn’t punch me.

I didn’t get fined, you know. Yeah, 

Steve Cuden: that’s, I love stories like that. Although, and that’s tells you again about Hollywood, where the priorities are. It’s about status and parking spaces and pretty cars, expensive cars. That’s Hollywood. His car is much prettier than mine. Like, well, yeah. Yeah, that would be true.

Um, all right, so last question for you today, Tony. Um, you’ve shared with us a pretty significant amount of really excellent advice throughout the whole show, but I’m wondering is there a single solid piece of advice that you like to give to those who are just starting out in the business as a writer, or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to that next level?

I’ve got a lot of bad advice. 

Anthony Swofford: Um, but, uh, well give us some of it. You like, never stop writing, like, like trust your talent and, um, just always write, you know, like, like I, a TV writer, friend of mine, very successful and he’s like, write a pilot a year. Like if you want to be a TV writer. Write a pilot a year.

Because, because you never know when someone will say, Hey, uh, we need a show about this. And you’re like, oh, shit, I’ve got a show about that. And it might not be perfect, but, but yeah, just like never stop writing. Believe in your talent and, and when everyone’s telling you no, just tell yourself that they’re wrong.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that that’s extraordinarily wise advice and, and on top of that, it’s almost never fails. If you go in to take a pitch session in Hollywood and they don’t like what you’re pitching, they will frequently kindly say to you, do you have anything else? Sure. And there you would have a nice trunk full of ideas, even if it’s not what you were pitching.

Yeah. You always need to have like three or four things, you know. In the hopper. Always. Always. It’s very important. And I, I just want to point out to, uh, our listeners that we did have a visitor from the world of Cats here today, which is, sorry. Yeah, 

Anthony Swofford: that’s, um, that’s a cat We call Freddie Fender. Freddie Fender, 

Steve Cuden: yeah.

Can. Can, can, can Freddy Fender play? 

Anthony Swofford: No. He can’t play for shit. He can’t, he can’t play. 

Steve Cuden: Um, Tony Swofford, this has been so much fun for me and I can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your wisdom today. It’s just been terrific chatting with you. 

Anthony Swofford: Absolute blast, Steve. Thanks, uh, thanks for for your insights and, uh, and, and, and for the great time.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others.

Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.