A harrowing, gripping tale of the wretched agony that was Vietnam. 60 years on we wear clothes that say Made in Vietnam. Why did we lose so many in this protracted war? Many of the answers make this novel the definitive one about the Marines during the Vietnam era, a compelling narrative that’s difficult to put down.
In the summer of 1979, Karl Marlantes, a recently demobilised veteran posted to US Marine Corps headquarters after 13 months of highly decorated active service, found himself walking some sensitive military papers across to the capital. He was challenged by a group of young anti-war protesters “hollering obscenities”, chanting “babykiller” and waving North Vietnamese flags.
“I was stunned and hurt”, he recalls. “I thought, you have no idea who I am…. yes I wanted to shoot them. Six weeks before, I was killing guerrillas in combat.” As his immediate rage moderated into puzzled anguish, Marlantes found himself wanting to explain himself to the kids. “I just wanted to tell my story.”
The national trauma of war was dragging on and he intended to address something huge in the life of contemporary America. “The Vietnam War was a defining experience in the US,” he says. ” It made this incredible divide, even within families. The Democrats were anti-war and the Republicans supported the troops. It shaped a generation, at least, and conditioned our response to things like Iraq and Afghanistan.
By 1977 Marlantes had completed a massive first-person narrative, he says, full of “psycho-babble” and an unmediated bitterness that he is now embarrassed to contemplate. No publisher would touch it. So he went back to a second draft, and a third…. Finally, 35 years after he first sat down at his manual typewriter- by now divorced and in his 60s- he completed the novel that’s called MATTERHORN, the title of which is derived from the code name for a remote, mountainous military outpost, a “firebase”, near the demilitarised zone(DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam and the Laotian border, not dissimilar to the notorious Hill 937, or Hamburger Hill. Matterhorn became a killing field for the young Marines of Bravo Company, as they repeatedly try to secure a patch of Vietcong ground.
They are led by a young 2nd lieutenant named Waino Mellas, who has much in common with Marlantes: an Ivy League graduate from rural Ohio who adheres to the values of his childhood rather than the smart, East Coast radicalism of his Princeton room-mates. Mellas volunteers for the Marine Corps and, wet behind the ears, takes command of a platoon in the North-West corner of Southern Vietnam during the rainy season of 1969, just as Marlantes did.
While Marlantes was painfully translating his tour of duty into fiction throughout the 70s and 80s, supporting himself as an energy consultant, the US was coming to terms with its national nightmare. The first successful account of Vietnam occurred in non-fiction, in 1977 with Michael Herr’s ‘Dispatches’, a landmark volume of reportage based on Herr’s visits to Khe Sanh for Esquire magazine at roughly the same time that Marlantes was attacking his Matterhorn.
Herr’s achievement was to find a voice in which to describe an unimaginable apocalypse. He wrote, describing the dead, “You want to look and you don’t want to look….once, I looked at them strung from the perimeter to the treeline, most of them clumped together nearest the wire. Then I heard an M16 on full automatic, starting to go through clips, a second to fire, three to plug in a fresh Clip, and i saw a man out there, doing it. Every round was like a tiny concentration of high-velocity wind making the bodies wince and shudder.
By the mid-80s, the war in Vietnam was becoming lost in the slipstream of history. Many books and films about Vietnam have been unable to suppress a persistent strain of fear and loathing for the place. For Marlantes the impulse was to celebrate a noble sacrifice and to make his novel an act of homage to the fallen. With the pressure of time, too, he had found a way to deal with the unmentionable face of conflict- the inevitable racism of the front line where whites were fighting alongside black troops. You cannot imagine how racist the army was in the 60s, he says. “Out in the field, we were held together by fear, but once the troops were back at base the old divisions, black and white, would come back.’”
There are none better, in this tragic event that the Vietnam war was, than the exploration of the psychological toll of war, the challenges of racial tensions within the ranks, and the bureaucratic obstacles that the Marines faced. A must-read for an understanding of this crucial epoch in our times.
