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Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War Kindle Edition
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAtlantic Monthly Press
- Publication dateApril 1, 2010
- File size6066 KB
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Amazon Exclusive: Mark Bowden Reviews Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
Mark Bowden is the bestselling author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, as well as The Best Game Ever, Bringing the Heat, Killing Pablo, and Guests of the Ayatollah. He reported at The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and other magazines. He lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania.
Matterhorn is a great novel. There have been some very good novels about the Vietnam War, but this is the first great one, and I doubt it will ever be surpassed. Karl Marlantes overlooks no part of the experience, large or small, from a terrified soldier pondering the nature of good and evil, to the feel and smell of wet earth against scorched skin as a man tries to press himself into the ground to escape withering fire. Here is story-telling so authentic, so moving and so intense, so relentlessly dramatic, that there were times I wasn’t sure I could stand to turn the page. As with the best fiction, I was sad to reach the end.
The wrenching combat in Matterhorn is ultimately pointless; the marines know they are fighting a losing battle in the long run. Bravo Company carves out a fortress on the top of the hill so named, one of countless low, jungle-coated mountains near the border of Laos, only to be ordered to abandon it when they are done. After the enemy claims the hill’s deep bunkers and carefully constructed fields of fire, the company is ordered to take it back, to assault their own fortifications. They do so with devastating consequences, only to be ordered in the end to abandon Matterhorn once again.
Against this backdrop of murderous futility, Marlantes’ memorable collection of marines is pushed to its limits and beyond. As the deaths and casualties mount, the men display bravery and cowardice, ferocity and timidity, conviction and doubt, hatred and love, intelligence and stupidity. Often these opposites are contained in the same person, especially in the book’s compelling main character, Second Lt. Waino Mellas. As Mellas and his men struggle to overcome impossible barriers of landscape, they struggle to overcome similarly impossible barriers between each other, barriers of race and class and rank. Survival forces them to cling to each other and trust each other and ultimately love each other. There has never been a more realistic portrait or eloquent tribute to the nobility of men under fire, and never a more damning portrait of a war that ground them cruelly underfoot for no good reason.
Marlantes brilliantly captures the way combat morphs into clean abstraction as fateful decisions move up the chain of command, further and further away from the actual killing and dying. But he is too good a novelist to paint easy villains. His commanders make brave decisions and stupid ones. High and low there is the same mix of cowardice and bravery, ambition and selflessness, ineptitude and competence.
There are passages in this book that are as good as anything I have ever read. This one comes late in the story, when the main character, Mellas, has endured much, has killed and also confronted the immediate likelihood of his own death, and has digested the absurdity of his mission: "He asked for nothing now, nor did he wonder if he had been good or bad. Such concepts were all part of the joke he’d just discovered. He cursed God directly for the savage joke that had been played on him. And in that cursing Mellas for the first time really talked with his God. Then he cried, tears and snot mixing together as they streamed down his face, but his cries were the rage and hurt of a newborn child, at last, however roughly, being taken from the womb."
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the greatest books are those you read not just with your heart or your mind, but with your spine. This is one for the spine. --Mark Bowden
From Publishers Weekly
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Review
Matterhorn is one of the most powerful and moving novels about combat, the Vietnam War, and war in general that I have ever read. --Dan Rather, award-winning TV news anchor
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MATTERHORN
A NOVEL OF THE VIETNAM WARBy KARL MARLANTESAtlantic Monthly Press
Copyright © 2010 Karl MarlantesAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1928-5
Chapter One
Mellas stood beneath the gray monsoon clouds on the narrow strip of cleared ground between the edge of the jungle and the relative safety of the perimeter wire. He tried to focus on counting the other thirteen Marines of the patrol as they emerged single file from the jungle, but exhaustion made focusing difficult. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to shut out the smell of the shit, which sloshed in the water that half-filled the open latrine pits above him on the other side of the wire. Rain dropped from the lip of his helmet, fell past his eyes, and spattered onto the satiny olive cloth that held the armor plating of his cumbersome new flak jacket. The dark green T-shirt and boxer shorts that his mother had dyed for him just three weeks ago clung to his skin, heavy and clammy beneath his camouflage utility jacket and trousers. He knew there would be leeches clinging to his legs, arms, back, and chest beneath his wet clothes, even though he couldn't feel them now. It was the way with leeches, he mused. They were so small and thin before they started sucking your blood that you rarely felt them unless they fell on you from a tree, and you never felt them piercing your skin. There was some sort of natural anesthetic in their saliva. You would discover them later, swollen with blood, sticking out from your skin like little pregnant bellies.When the last Marine entered the maze of switchbacks and crude gates in the barbed wire, Mellas nodded to Fisher, the squad leader, one of three who reported to him. "Eleven plus us three," he said. Fisher nodded back, put his thumb up in agreement, and entered the wire. Mellas followed him, trailed by his radio operator, Hamilton.
The patrol emerged from the wire, and the young Marines climbed slowly up the slope of the new fire support base, FSB Matterhorn, bent over with fatigue, picking their way around shattered stumps and dead trees that gave no shelter. The verdant underbrush had been hacked down with K-bar knives to clear fields of fire for the defensive lines, and the jungle floor, once veined with rivulets of water, was now only sucking clay.
The thin, wet straps of Mellas's two cotton ammunition bandoleers dug into the back of his neck, each with the weight of twenty fully loaded M-16 magazines. These straps had rubbed him raw. All he wanted to do now was get back to his hooch and take them off, along with his soaking boots and socks. He also wanted to go unconscious. That, however, wasn't possible. He knew he would finally have to deal with the nagging problem that Bass, his platoon sergeant, had laid on him that morning and that he had avoided by using the excuse of leaving on patrol. A black kid-he couldn't remember the name; a machine gunner in Third Squad-was upset with the company gunnery sergeant, whose name he couldn't remember either. There were forty new names and faces in Mellas's platoon alone, and almost 200 in the company, and black or white they all looked the same. It overwhelmed him. From the skipper right on down, they all wore the same filthy tattered camouflage, with no rank insignia, no way of distinguishing them. All of them were too thin, too young, and too exhausted. They all talked the same, too, saying fuck, or some adjective, noun, or adverb with fuck in it, every four words. Most of the intervening three words of their conversations dealt with unhappiness about food, mail, time in the bush, and girls they had left behind in high school. Mellas swore he'd succumb to none of it.
This black kid wanted out of the bush to have his recurrent headaches examined, and some of the brothers were stirring things up in support. The gunnery sergeant thought the kid was malingering and should have his butt kicked. Then another black kid refused to have his hair cut and people were up in arms about that. Mellas was supposed to be fighting a war. No one at the Basic School had said he'd be dealing with junior Malcolm X's and redneck Georgia crackers. Why couldn't the Navy corpsmen just decide shit like whether headaches were real or not? They were supposed to be the medical experts. Did the platoon commanders on Iwo Jima have to deal with crap like this?
As Mellas plodded slowly up the hill, with Fisher next to him and Hamilton automatically following with the radio, he became embarrassed by the sound his boots made as they pulled free of the mud, fearing that it would draw attention to the fact that they were still shiny and black. He quickly covered for this by complaining to Fisher about the squad's machine gunner, Hippy, making too much noise when Fisher had asked for the machine gun to come to the head of the small column because the point man thought he'd heard movement. Just speaking about the recent near-encounter with an enemy Mellas had not yet seen started his insides humming again, the vibration of fear that was like a strong electric potential with no place to discharge. Part of him was relieved that it had been a near miss but another part acted peeved that the noise might have cost them an opportunity for action, and this peevishness in turn irked Fisher.
When they reached the squad's usual position in the company lines, Mellas could see that Fisher could barely contain his own annoyance by the way he nearly threw to the ground the three staves he'd cut for himself and a couple of friends while out on the patrol. These staves were raw material for short-timer's sticks, elaborately carved walking sticks, roughly an inch and a half in diameter and three to five feet long. Some were simple calendars, others works of folk art. Each stick was marked in a way that showed how many days its owner had survived on his thirteen-month tour of duty and how many days were left to go. Mellas had also been anxious about the sound Fisher had made cutting the three staves with a machete, but he had said nothing. He was still in a delicate position: nominally in charge of the patrol, because he was the platoon commander, but until he was successfully broken in he was also under the orders of Lieutenant Fitch, the company commander, to do everything Fisher said. Mellas had accepted the noise for two reasons, both political. Fitch had basically said Fisher was in charge, so why buck Fitch? Fitch was the guy who could promote Mellas to executive officer, second in command, when Second Lieutenant Hawke rotated out of the bush. That would put him in line for company commander-unless Hawke wanted it. A second reason was that Mellas hadn't been sure if the noise was dangerous, and he was far more worried about asking stupid questions than finding out. Too many stupid comments and dumb questions at this stage could make it more difficult to gain the respect of the platoon, and it was a lot harder to get ahead if the snuffs didn't like you or thought you were incompetent. The fact that Hawke, his predecessor, had been nearly worshipped by the platoon did not help matters.
Mellas and Hamilton left Fisher at Second Squad's line of holes and slowly climbed up a slope so steep that when Mellas slipped backward in the mud he barely had to bend his knee to stop himself. Hamilton, bowed nearly double with the weight of the radio, kept poking its antenna into the slope in front of him. The fog that swirled around them obscured their goal: a sagging makeshift shelter they had made by snapping their rubberized canvas ponchos together and hanging the ponchos over a scrap of communication wire strung only four feet above the ground between two blasted bushes. This hooch, along with two others that stood just a few feet away from it, formed what was called, not without irony, the platoon command post.
Mellas wanted to crawl inside his hooch and make the world disappear, but he knew this would be stupid and any rest would be short. It would be dark in a couple of hours, and the platoon had to set out trip flares in case any soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army-the NVA-approached. After that, the platoon had to rig the claymore mines, which were placed in front of their fighting holes and were detonated by pulling on a cord; they delivered 700 steel balls in a fan-shaped pattern at groin height. In addition, the uncompleted sections of the barbed wire had to be booby-trapped. If Mellas wanted to heat his C-rations he had to do so while it was still daylight, otherwise the flame would make a perfect aiming point. Then he had to inspect the forty Marines of his platoon for immersion foot and make sure everyone took the daily dose of dapsone for jungle rot and the weekly dose of chloroquine for malaria.
He and Hamilton stopped just in front of Bass, the platoon sergeant, who was squatting outside the hooches in the rain making coffee in a number-ten can set over a piece of burning C-4 plastic explosive. The C-4 hissed and left an acrid smell in the air but was preferred to the eye-burning stink of the standard issue trioxane heat tabs. Bass was twenty-one and on his second tour. He emptied several small envelopes of powdered C-ration coffee into the boiling water and peered into the can. The sleeves of his utility jacket were neatly rolled into cuffs just below his elbows, revealing forearms that were large and muscular. Mellas, watching Bass stir, set the M-16 he had borrowed from Bass against a log. It had taken very little coaxing from Bass to convince Mellas that it was stupid to rely on the standard-issue .45 pistols the Marine Corps deemed sufficient for junior officers. He pulled off the wet cotton ammunition bandoleers and let them fall to the ground: twenty magazines, each filled with two interwoven rows of bullets. Then he shrugged out of his belt suspenders and dropped them to the mud, along with their attached .45 automatic, three quart-size plastic canteens, pistol ammunition, his K-bar, battlefield compresses to stop bleeding, two M-26 fragmentation hand grenades, three smoke grenades, and his compass. Breathing deeply with relief, he kept watching the coffee, its smell reminding him of the ever-present pot on his mother's stove. He didn't want to go check the platoon's weapons or clean his own. He wanted something warm, and then he wanted to lie down and sleep. But with dark coming there was no time.
He undid his steel-spring blousing garters, which held the ends of his trousers tightly against his boots as protection against leeches. Three leeches had still managed to get through on his left leg. Two were attached and there was a streak of dried blood where a third had engorged itself and dropped off. Mellas found it in his sock, shook it loose onto the ground, and stepped on it with his other foot, watching his own blood pop out of its body. He took out insect repellant and squeezed a stream onto the other two leeches still attached to his skin. They twisted in pain and dropped off, leaving a slow trickle of blood behind.
Bass handed him some coffee in an empty C-ration fruit cocktail can and then poured another can for Hamilton, who had dumped his radio in front of his and Mellas's hooch and was sitting on it. Hamilton took the coffee, raised the can to Bass in a toast, and wrapped his fingers around the can to warm them.
"Thanks, Sergeant Bass," Mellas said, careful to use the title Bass had earned, knowing that Bass's goodwill was crucial. He sat down on a wet, rotting log. Bass described what had happened while Mellas was out on patrol. FAC-man, the company's enlisted forward air controller, had once again not been able to talk a resupply chopper down through the clouds, so this had been the fourth day without resupply. There was still no definitive word on the firefight the day before between Alpha Company and an NVA unit of unknown size in the valley below them, but the rumor that four Marines had been killed in action was now confirmed.
Mellas tightened his lips and clenched his teeth to press back his fear. He couldn't help looking down onto the cloud-covered ridges that stretched out below them into North Vietnam, just four kilometers away. Down there were the four KIAs, four dead kids. Somewhere in that gray-green obscurity, Alpha Company had just been in the shit. Bravo's turn was coming.
That meant his turn was coming, something that had been only a possibility when he had joined the Marines right out of high school. He had entered a special officer candidate program that allowed him to attend college while training in the summers and getting much-needed pay, and he had envisioned telling admiring people, and maybe someday voters, that he was an ex-Marine. He had never actually envisioned being in combat in a war that none of his friends thought was worth fighting. When the Marines landed at Da Nang during his freshman year, he had to get a map out to see where that was. He had wanted to go into the Marine Air Wing and be an air traffic controller, but each administrative turning point, his grades in college, his grades in Basic School, and the shortage of infantry officers had implacably moved him to where he was now, a real Marine officer leading a real Marine rifle platoon, and scared nearly witless. It occurred to him that because of his desire to look good coming home from a war, he might never come home at all.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MATTERHORNby KARL MARLANTES Copyright © 2010 by Karl Marlantes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Product details
- ASIN : B003V8BRTQ
- Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 2010)
- Publication date : April 1, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 6066 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 617 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #71,007 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #214 in Classic American Literature
- #227 in Education & Reference (Kindle Store)
- #275 in Military Historical Fiction
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About the author
A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. His debut novel, Matterhorn, will be published in April 2010 by Grove/Atlantic.
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Not surprisingly, the frustration of fighting a phantom enemy is on full display in Matterhorn. Whether the enemy is the elusive Viet Cong, the careerist commanders long on ambition and short on compassion, or the racial polarization and illicit drug use, Marlantes' Marines are under constant attack. Indeed, the company and platoon commanders are very nearly defeated before they even leave their patrol base. The author also shines a very harsh light on the difficult hand these young Americans were dealt in a war with seemingly no end... and in how the battles were fought - often with precious little prospect for victory.
One can guess from following 2nd Lieutenant Waino Mellas's baptism by fire that Marlantes' own experience as a company grade officer in the Marine Corps during the Viet Nam era was an uneasy one. And those officers and noncommissioned officers with whom he served, if not eccentric, were probably quite unique. The author develops his characters exceedingly well which contributes much to his storyteller's art.
Undoubtedly, Marlantes' most impressive creation is the idealistic Mellas.
The reader easily appreciates Mellas's inner struggles to overcome his doubts, anxieties, and fears as a newly minted Marine officer thrown into the breach. His constant questioning is suggestive of a thinking, highly intelligent young man trying to reconcile his doubts about the war with his sense of duty. We readers are witness to Mellas's inner torment and ultimately come to recognize what young Marine officers - the Marlantes, Webbs, and Caputos - faced in their efforts to make sense of the nonsensical... or to find sanity in the insane.
Most poignant in Matterhorn is the tragedy that stalks the Marines through virtually every day of their 12-month tour. Lieutenants such as Mellas, Hawke, and Fitch, though barely adults, deal with this life-and-death reality as best they can. They are entrusted with the awesome responsibility for young Marines' lives and have to constantly balance the risk of losing men with mission accomplishment. While fully embracing that warrior spirit that makes them USMC officers, they agonize over decisions they know will consign their charges to a premature death. We can certainly imagine that these noble Americans might live the rest of their lives with the consequences of those decisions, that they would be forever changed by their experience. But it takes a book like Matterhorn to really put into perspective just how life-altering that experience truly was... and perhaps how difficult and painful those men's subsequent journeys have been.
Matterhorn clearly raises the bar for the war novel genre. Marlantes combines his considerable skills as a writer with his real-world experience as a combat leader to deliver a highly readable book. His vivid imagery makes the combat scenes come to life and leaves an indelible imprint on the reader's imagination. Those scenes are as stunningly real as they are pathetically sad. After getting through the final climactic battle with the North Vietnamese, I found myself emotionally spent. This book, both instructive and entertaining, offers readers an unusually honest view of the Viet Nam War from the perspective of those guileless and unfailingly loyal junior officers who, as in all wars, shoulder the heaviest load.
A fabulous first novel. We should all hope that we have not seen the end of Karl Marlantes!
Bravo!
Matterhorn follows Lieutenant Waino Wellas and the men of Bravo Company as they hold and fortify, then abandon, then retake a strategically located hill near the Laotian border. The novel traces the military decisions from their genesis at battalion headquarters, through the junior officers leading the company all the way down to the grunts in the field as those decisions are executed. Showing each layer as he does, Marlantes reveals the game of telephone that is warfare in Vietnam, with the orders distorting through the filter of incompetence, personal initiative, heroism, terror and bad weather.
Matterhorn is also a kind of bildungsroman for Mellas, introducing him as a green officer with political ambitions and watching him change into a cynical veteran who has lost his faith in both the Marine corps leadership and humanity, even the meaning of life itself. His journey, as well as the journey of various supporting characters, is as riveting and compelling as anything I've ever read. There is a sincerity and integrity to these characters as Marlantes has molded them, taking what could have been flat cliches and turning them into characters who pop off the page and live inside your head.
This is going to seem a bit strange, but Matterhorn is the best war novel I've read since Joe Haldeman's science fiction classic, The Forever War. He makes the action exciting, but never gives the pathos of death the short shift. As we get to know these characters and how they live, we also see them in their last moments as they face death. Though there's an impressive cast of characters and it's sometimes hard to keep track of them all, one really feels the loss as each man falls in combat.
Much time is spent focused on military politics, as well as the racial and class divisions of the Vietnam era. And although some of the racial monologues can seem forced, Marlantes handles the issue of racism in the Marine corps with deft precision, providing a balanced look at the black soldiers caught up in the struggle for civil rights, the white non-commissioned officers who have seen their corps transformed since they were enlisted men in the Second World War and Korea, and the soldiers caught in the middle. Mellas himself wrestles with race, just as the country did, never quite finding the right answer to the issue.
In the end, though, it's the futility of war that drives the central message of Matterhorn. Human lives are discarded casually by ambitious officers looking to pad body counts, and positions that were fought for on one day are abandoned the next, only to be fought for again. The question Marlantes asks is: "Was this war worth the loss of so many lives?" And the answer -- that it wasn't -- is at the heart of what still divides the country on Vietnam. It's a hard thing to accept that so many people died for nothing, so it's easier to attack those who say it than to accept the truth. The same question is being asked of Iraq and Afghanistan, and sadly, I think the answer might still be the same. Wars based on political ideology, rather than a clear and concrete territorial objective, can never be successful.
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I'm not really an avid reader of history or war books, but was travelling in Cambodia at the time, and had read lots of books about that country, when I decided a dose of Vietnam war would help with context.
I have no idea how I found this book. But boy am I glad I did. It is a fascinating story with wonderful characters from beginning to end. The shocking futility of war, and the damage that is causes, made whole only by the enforced camaraderie that such an environment creates is a study in human nature that is brought to life incredibly vividly in this book.
Reading this at a time when America and the world are again fighting a war that feels as futile if not more futile than the one that Karl Marlantes was sent to fight makes it hugely poignant. Replace the wet jungle with the dry dunes, the Viet Kong with the Taliban and you have, once again, a terribly sad carbon copy of events that have happened before, just with a different set of characters who will be just as badly and permanently affected and damaged as those that came before.
Its incredibly sobering reading this book. I came out of it with a completely new respect for the poor men and women we send in to fight our wars. Who shoot at each other with practically no real knowledge of why, and certainly no knowledge of who. How can they? That would humanise the whole thing, and make it a job no one could or would do.
And so the biggest single thing that this book will leave with you is the irrefutable knowledge that it is IMPOSSIBLE to win a war against an enemy who cares more deeply about the outcome than you do. A more motivated enemy. One that is defending its way of life, land, culture, whatever and wherever that may be.
Don't read this book if you prefer not to know what happens when you try.