The Immaculate Invasion

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.