Immaculate Invasion: A War Story with No War in It

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

Product Description
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.

I have yet to discover an accurate account IN A BOOK of the events of 1991 and everything afterwards. Academics bought into Aristide's propaganda and, so far as I have found, all write with an extreme bias. (Paul Farmer's book is another on the subject that is full of errors and bias)

This book is worthless and biased - take it from someone who has studied Haiti's history, past and present, extensively, and who was there at the time.

My copy is in the garbage.


Well Written and Interesting View   December 2, 2002
John G. Hilliard (Toronto Canada)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

There are not a lot of books covering the USA operation / occupation of Haiti in 1994 so I was excited to find this one. I was looking forward to a review of what actually happened, what forces were used, what they did and the overall politics involved. Unfortunately for me this book really did not cover that aspect of the occupation. The author spent his time with one group of Special Forces troops and detailed out what they went through and what the author saw going on in Haiti. This was interesting and well written, but a little too limited for my taste. The book is almost what you would expect a conversation would be like with a college buddy who was there and saw the events, not a complete account from a historic perspective.

With this being said I really enjoyed the book. It gives the reader a soldiers / reports eye view of the situation in Haiti. The real desperate conditions the Haitians live in came through in the writing. You also got a good feeling for the confusion that soldiers fell into by being asked to function is tasks that they really are not trained for, police work, social work and community planning. Shacochis also had a great way of off the cuff, smart remarks that added a lot of humor to the book. You can tell that his main writing has been fiction in the past because he spends a lot of time on the scene development - making sure the reader understands the sights and smells and not just the investigative reports trap of just the facts. I would have liked more detail, but overall the book was enjoyable.


From someone who has actually been there   December 19, 2001
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

I highly recommend this book. Immaculate Invasion does an excellent job of portraying the events of Operation Restore Democracy. I should know, because I was a Special Forces soldier there on the ground. Although I disagree with a few of Shacochis'comments and characterizations, he is generally very accurate with his information. Shacochis tells it like it is (or was), from his point of reference. He pulls no punches. He relates the good,the bad, and the ugly regarding the US Military, the US Government, the Haitian people, and the Haitian Government. I find it laughable that several people who have neither been to Haiti nor been in the military would submit harsh reviews of this work. Take it from someone who has been there. This is an excellent book.


Reads like a slapstick parody of U.S. foreign policy   August 25, 2001
G. Goodman (Colorado)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

The Immaculate Invasion does a good job of using the forgotten liberating invasion of Haiti in the 1990's to poke fun at the grand ole' U.S.A. and its absurd military and policy strategies concerning the Third World. It gains more relevance since it occurred right in our back yard, albeit in the highly impoverished and very black caribbean island of Haiti that reminds no one of their favorite tour destination. That's also what makes it an interesting read. How much does anybody really know about this tortured little slice of land that, if you live in the right area of the nation, is closer to your front door than New York or Oregon or numerous points in between? The author writes as a journalist, but injects enough humour here and there to liven up the work. The book is very well researched and full of fascinating historical and modern factoids. The culture of Haiti is both comic and fascinating and desperate at once, while the culture of the U.S. military is seen as it really is in these situations - ridiculous. The most powerful military in history intervening in places like Haiti and Somalia and Grenada, albeit in a "peacekeeping" role, really shows what a stupid bunch of apes we let people elect to rule us.