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Product Description
For eighteen months, Bob Shacochis covered "Operation Uphold Democracy" in Haiti, where he bunked with a team of Special Forces Commandos--the most highly trained and sophisticated warriors in history. There, he observed both the heroic exploits and the unrelenting frustrations of men struggling to be soldiers in a military environment in which "acceptable losses" has evolved to mean "no losses whatsoever." From the Pentagon's war room to the dangerously divided U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and the inner circles of both Haiti's military junta and the terrorist group FRAPH, Shacochis chronicles what the military calls OTW--Operations Other Than War. The result is a revelatory view of modern-day warfare, an assessment of our obligations as the world's peacekeeper, and a song of freedom dedicated to not just the Haitian people, but to any culture staggering through the aftershock of twentieth-century imperialism.
"A bitter, funny, engrossing adventure between the mysteries and comedy of the American military machine and the infinite suffering of Haiti."-- Herbert Gold, San Francisco Chronicle
"Every war brings forth one perfect book. . . . Now we have The Immaculate Invasion, the masterpiece of the 1994 U.S. assault on and occupation of Haiti." --James Zug, Chicago Tribune
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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