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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
When an 11th-hour diplomatic initiative in September 1994 transformed a planned U.S. military invasion of Haiti into a peacekeeping mission to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, Shacochis, an NBA-winning fiction writer, was waiting on the sidelines. Shacochis had first visited Haiti in 1986 in the heyday of the uprising that sent dictator Baby Doc Duvalier into exile, a trip that left him fascinated with the helter-skelter history of the region. Taking an assignment from Harper's, Shacochis returned to Haiti in the wake of the U.S. occupation, traversing the country with a circle of war-hardened reporters before finally pitching his tent with a detachment of special forces commandos in Limbe, a sprawling, isolated mountain district termed "the unfriendliest town in Haiti." There, Shacochis observes at eye-level the vagaries of "Operations Other than War," the sort of open-ended relief work that has defined American military intervention abroad since Vietnam, in which, in his words, "soldiers weren't obsolete, only victory." A country engulfed in an unending nightmare of government atrocities, revolt and grinding poverty, Haiti proves especially resistant to the best intentions of the soldiers Shacochis meets and befriends. Interweaving dispatches from the streets of Haiti and interviews with commanding officers, Shacochis assails those in the military who failed to grasp the moral complexities of Haitian politics, singling out for particular scorn Colonel Mark Boyatt, whom he terms "the Elvis of Operation Uphold Democracy," and who allegedly characterized the FRAPH, a Haitian terrorist organization, as "the loyal opposition." Favoring a gonzo, visceral style clotted with regional patois and military jargon, over the graceful lucidity of a correspondent like Philip Gourevitch, Shacochis presents a narrative that at times resembles a hair-raising, humvee ride through the jungle. But what emerges, ultimately, is a potent chronicle of both a Caribbean nation and a U.S. military machine in profound transition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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