Jonathan Marwil |
Review of Karl
Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. New
York: Atlantic Monthly Press / Berkeley: León Literary Arts,
2010. Pp. 598. ISBN 978-0-8021-1928-5. |
In America the Vietnam
War is a wound yet to be healed, and the questions persistently asked
about the war seem only to exacerbate the wound. Should we have become
involved? Having done so, did we fight it with the right strategies
and weapons? Should we, at the very least, be proud of our sacrifices?
Most Americans avoid these questions unless the war emerges in public
debate, as happened in the 2004 presidential campaign when John Kerry chose to make
his Vietnam service central to his candidacy. Otherwise, the war is
left to scholars, veterans, and military planners.
In our eagerness to
ignore Vietnam we are likely to forget that it was, for America, a war
with many unpleasant "firsts." It was, for example, the first war
during which the nation was asked to confront possible war crimes
committed by Americans. It was, in addition, the first time the nation
had to face up to the psychological damage that war inflicts. "Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder" focused our attention in ways that "Combat
Fatigue" never did. Vietnam was also the first war that "broke" the
American army, and, of course, the first we had to acknowledge losing.
Little wonder, therefore, that we have been far more eager to immerse
ourselves in memories of World War II. It was no accident that we
overlooked the ironic quotation marks in the title of Studs Terkel's
"The Good War."[1]
After Vietnam, yearning to be proud again, we were given the "Greatest
Generation" and a president who visited the beaches of Normandy.
Karl Marlantes served in
Vietnam and earned the Navy Cross along with several other medals. He
has been working on a novel about the war for thirty years, and the
result is Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. The addition
of the subtitle is odd: think of Catch 22 or For Whom the
Bell Tolls with comparable subtitles. Perhaps the publisher added
the words, thinking that "Matterhorn" alone suggested a tale
of mountain climbing in Switzerland, a subject of limited appeal in the
United States. Whatever the explanation, climbing mountains is what
Matterhorn is all about. Marlantes gives the name to a mountain in
Vietnam that the Marines have captured, are then told to vacate, and
subsequently ordered to recapture. What they go through, moreover, in
retaking the mountain bears comparison to the efforts of mountain
climbing, and so do many of the risks. Death may come with a single
false step, and instead of frostbite the Marines suffer from jungle
rot.
The novel is largely
confined to combat at the platoon and company levels. To assist the
reader, the author supplies a "Glossary of Weapons, Technical terms,
Slang and Jargon," which at twenty-one pages may be the longest such
ancillary ever attached to a war novel. Far from unique are the book's
characters, many of whom seem familiar: the central figure, 2nd
Lieutenant Waino Mellas, is young, inexperienced, and needing to prove
himself as he joins Bravo Company; Vancouver is an apparently fearless
squad leader who sports a sawed-off M-60 machine gun as his primary
weapon and is idolized by the members of his squad; two medics
("squids" as they were called in Vietnam) always do what must be done,
and expose themselves to danger without hesitation; Lt. Colonel
Simpson and Major Blakeley, the battalion commander and his operations
officer, are concerned first and foremost with their own careers; etc.
Though we have met such characters in other war novels, Marlantes
avoids making them stereotypes. Mellas, for example, is himself very
ambitious. Envisioning a political career after his service, he hopes
to win a medal and eventually command Bravo Company.
Aside from combat, the
other topic Matterhorn addresses is race. Vietnam was also the
first war in which the military was fully integrated. But Marlantes
reveals just how segregated Bravo Company was. Blacks and whites fight
as brothers, but once the firing stops each retreats into the
brotherhood of race. In one riveting scene, Mellas, a Princeton
graduate who sees himself as a liberal on matters of race, has his
illusions dispelled by a black Marine who grasps far better the racial
divide in America. "Don't get excited," he says to Mellas after
accusing him of being a racist. "I'm a racist too. You can't grow up
in America and not be a racist." If some black characters in
Matterhorn also seem familiar, like the black power advocate
Henry, others, like China, are more complicated.
Books written over a
period of decades are vulnerable to changes in attitude, both public
and private. Matterhorn is no exception. Routinely, Marlantes
refers to his Marines as "kids." While the average Marine or soldier
in Vietnam was younger than his World War II counterpart, calling them
kids is jarring, indeed, inappropriate. War has always been the
province of the young, often the very young. To call Marines and
soldiers kids smacks of the same misplaced, demanding sympathy that
currently brings the phrase "in harm's way" to the lips of presidents
and politicians speaking of sending men and women off to war. While a
book review is not the place to anaylyze why such unfortunate
locutions have crept into the American vocabulary about war, one
wonders whether the Karl Marlantes of 1969, or any of his fellow
Marines, would have appreciated being labeled "kids."
Some reviewers have
greeted this book as if it might finally be the novel that explains
Vietnam.[2]
No novel will ever do that. War can inspire great novels, but their
writers--one hopes--do not imagine their task is to explain their
particular war. How could they? War is arguably the murkiest, most
complex of all humanly engineered enterprises. Combat is only one
facet of it. We should thankful for a good book about the
combat experience, but for the rest--and Vietnam was a particularly
complicated war--we need to look elsewhere. It would surprise me if
Marlantes himself does not know that.
The University of Michigan
jmarwil@umich.edu
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[2] See, e.g., Sebastian Junger, NY Times (1
Apr 2010): "Chapter after chapter, battle after battle, Marlantes
pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and
devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam…. 'Matterhorn' is a
raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final
exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history"
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