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Immaculate Invasion: A War Story with No War in It
by Bob Shacochis
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Viking Adult (1999-02-01)
ISBN: 0670863041
EAN: 9780670863044
Dewy Decimal #: 972.94073
Hardcover: 416 pages
Condition: Very Good
Comments: "BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!"
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Bob Shacochis has been praised as a "stunning" writer who "summons the spirits of America and the Third World" (New York Newsday). Now, he brings to his first major work of reportage the worldview and political vision that have earned him comparisons with Graham Greene and V. S. Naipaul. Here is his eyewitness account of the 1994 invasion and occupation of Haiti, of American soldiers deployed into a strange war zone, "where there are no friends and no enemies, no front or rear, no victories and, likewise, no defeats, and no true endings." From the Pentagon's war room to the bitter infighting in the dangerously divided U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and its on again/off again relationship with terrorists, Shacochis chronicles what the military calls OTW Operations--other than war. Most enduring, from his eighteen months in the field in Haiti where he lived with a team of Special Forces commandos, Shacochis brings us the stories of soldiers, their exploits and frustrations, their inner lives as well as their heroic deeds, as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. Not since Michael Herr's Dispatches has an American author of this stature written such a ground-eye view of soldiering, as intimate and telling as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
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Amazon.com Review
In The Immaculate Invasion, Bob Shacochis, winner of the 1985 National Book Award for Easy in the Islands, returns to the Caribbean setting to tell the story of Operation Uphold Democracy, the United States government's official name for its 1994 occupation of Haiti. Focusing on the Clinton administration's policymakers and the soldiers who implemented their plans, Shacochis explores the capacity for altruistic action in the midst of a bloody pandemonium of human-rights outrages. While the American military's original strategy was to obliterate the murderous regime of General Cedras--executing a "hard entry" with "attitude and with a lot of ammunition"--they quickly found themselves caught up in a haphazard scheme for the transformation of the despot's thugs into a political party. Such cynical accommodationism confused the rules of engagement and restricted soldiers' ability to respond to atrocities. One officer, Captain Lawrence Rockwood, infuriated with by superiors' bureaucratic disregard of the concentration-camp-like conditions of Haiti's prisons, disobeyed orders and personally attempted to seize a jail in which dozens of prisoners were slowly dying. Shacochis follows Rockwood through his subsequent arrest and court martial, which he faces unrepentantly: "I'm an American soldier," Rockwood insists, "not a member of the Waffen SS." Blending Haitian history and culture with his accounts of living amongst a Special Forces team, Shacochis achieves an unsettling triumph of combat journalism that will earn The Immaculate Invasion comparisons to other modern classics, such as Michael Herr's Dispatches. Its focus on compassion urges a profound redirection of the purposes and application of American interventionism. --James Highfill
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