Book Description
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.
