The Immaculate Invasion
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“Every war brings forth one perfect book. . . . Now we have The Immaculate Invasion, the masterpiece of the 1994 US assault on and occupation of Haiti.” —Chicago Tribune
Widely celebrated upon its original publication in 1999, National Book Award winning writer Bob Shacochis’s The Immaculate Invasion is a gritty, poetic, and revelatory look at the American intervention in Haiti.
In 1994, the United States embarked on Operation Uphold Democracy, a response to the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian government by a brutal military coup. As a reporter for Harper’s, Bob Shacochis traveled to Haiti and was embedded—long before the idea became popular in Iraq—with a team of Special Forces commandos for eighteen months. He came away with tremendous insight into Haiti, the character of American fighters, and what can happen when an intervention turns into a misadventure.
In The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis captures the exploits and frustrations, the inner lives and heroic deeds of young Americans as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. The Immaculate Invasion is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what has happened in Haiti in the past, its current state, and its future path.
“An extraordinary book about an extraordinary event . . . I felt transported to Haiti. I could hear it. I could smell it. At moments I felt moved almost to tears, only to find myself, a page or two later, laughing out loud.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine
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.
