Author: Karl Marlantes 566 pp 2010
My rating: 5*
Started November 8 2010, Finished November 12 2010
A very powerful, pro-soldier, anti-war statement.
Marlantes' novel, presumably based on his time as a Marine Corps officer in Vietnam all those years ago, provided me with what was possibly my most intense reading experience ever. This unrelenting, stripped down -- Hemingwayesque? -- depiction of war puts the reader in the characters skins better than anything else I can remember, allowing him to feel a soldier’s boredom, terror and most of all, physical misery. In the world of Matterhorn, the putative enemy -- Vietcong troops -- are just another hostile force of nature along with weather, vegetation, tigers, malaria bearing mosquitoes, and leaches while the real foci of the soldiers’ animus are the commanding officers who needlessly send men to die simply to further their own careers. Anther major theme is the racial tension afflicting the Corps which almost magically evaporates during combat when the marines’ only hopes of survival are effective action as a unit. Matterhorn evokes other all time great war novels including Catch-22 (stripped of irony) in its depiction of a world where the main impetus of commanders is furthering their own career and The Naked and The Dead whose climactic mountain assault is reprised here.
“There it is.”
… what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted. (11)
He was trying to remember what he’d been told to do, back at Quantico. His mind seemed empty. … All alone. All alone, and maybe about to die. (83)
It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't even know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about. The wind picked up slightly, bring the smell of the jungle with it. Mellas shivered. He couldn't figure out why the didn’t just quit. Yet they wouldn't.
Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched everything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him. (351)
