The Aardvark Is Ready for War » (First Trade Paper Edition)

In the great American tradition of subversive war novels, The Aardvark Is Ready for War is a tour de force black comedy about one man's adventure inside the techno-military machine as he ships out aboard a naval aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf War. Caustic, disturbing, and fiercely funny, The Aardvark is Ready for War is the defining novel of modern warfare — that conducted with smart bombs and cathode ray tubes, and transmitted by CNN to homes across the world.

Publishers Weekly

This rambling satire of Navy life during the Gulf War follows "the Aardvark" (a video-addicted specialist in decoding submarine traces) and his aircraft-carrier crewmates en route from California to the Persian Gulf. Blinn splices the nervous tedium of ship life with drunken shore-leave antics in Hawaii and the Philippines, poking fun along the way at boneheads of several stripes: patriotic yahoos, stuffed-shirt officers and (oddly enough, in a navy satire) "overeducated" feminist civilians. Near the crew's destinationand the end of the novela crime is committed, fatal accidents ensue and the Aardvark finally understands what war at sea is all about. For all its intellectual pretensions (beginning with an epigraph by Jean "The-Gulf-War-Did-Not-Take-Place" Baudrillard), this Pacific log is minor stuff. Lacking the truly horrified sensibilities of Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22 (to which the publishers compare the novel), Blinn's hyper, pseudo-Pynchonesque prose substitutes tired gags (shipboard food, naval lust) and a technophobia so half-baked it could be spouted by Beavis and Butt-head. What really sinks the story, however, is the Ardvark himself, a frat-boy-as-narrator who may echo the cynicism and fears of real-life sailors-in-arms but will tire other readers long before his maritime misadventures reach their punchline of death.