Readers under the age of fifty-five can move on. Vietnam holds an intractable power over those of us, mostly males, who were of draftable age from around ‘65 to ‘71 or so. But it affected many of our parents, too, and may have had effects on policy decisions many years later by people who were able to avoid the quagmire.
An excellent, if terribly depressing, novel about Vietnam. Matterhorn is the code name of a hill a company of Marines is asked to defend and establish a base. The hills in the area are named for Swiss mountains. Marlantes’s protagonist, Mellas, is an ambitious fresh lieutenant. We’re never quite clear of how Mellas got there, and his motives are confused. He’s angling for the position of company commander but he’s also increasingly dismayed by the incompetence of his superiors (something that really pissed off some Amazon reviewers who mostly were some of those.)
Some rather horrible scenes, one where the group has just set up an ambush in the middle of the night when the man out front is mauled and killed by a tiger. In another scene, a marine gets a leech up his urethra, which would be funny except it’s horribly painful and life-threatening.
Apparently, the book was originally 1,600 pages long, finally cut to about 600 and the book takes the reader along to a deployment in Vietnam forced to accompany the troops as they , in Sisyphean fashion, slog along taking the hill, losing it, retaking it, rebuilding previous positions, in what inevitably becomes a futile effort to get anywhere.
“No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares. It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away.”
Reviews on Amazon all compliment the author for the book’s extreme realism.
There were the inevitable negative reviews complaining the book is anti-Vietnam (what was he supposed to do, make a John Wayne movie?), the officers were portrayed as buffoons (only in part), horribly written (utter nonsense), used the “f” word too much (I mean really, these are Marines in horrible conditions,) wrong portrayal of the fighter jocks (like Marlantes is only allowed have a positive view despite his experiences,) the bomb-bay door on an F-4 was wrongly described, etc., etc. There is an assumption on the part of several that if Marlantes experience in Vietnam didn’t mirror theirs exactly, it must be rubbish. Having read many Vietnam memoirs, each has a distinct perspective that reflects their own experience. Marlantes, btw, earned a Navy Cross, no slouchy thing. His hero is also not the most selfless, but you get the distinct feeling that the upper echelons were more interested in glory for themselves at the expense of their troops who were maneuvered as bait, so they could kill more VC. Casualties counts were manipulated to look smaller than they really were. A company's losses could be made to look less devastating by describing the action as a battalion level operation.
Marlantes unflinchingly describes the racial tensions that were becoming increasingly pronounced by 1969 when he was there. "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."
Mellas, who has much in common with Marlantes: an Ivy League graduate from rural Oregon who adheres to the values of his childhood rather than the smart, east coast radicalism of his Princeton roommates. Mellas volunteers for the Marine Corps and, wet behind the ears, takes command of a platoon in the north-west corner of South Vietnam during the rainy season of 1969, just as Marlantes did. "All second lieutenants in history are the same," he says. "I was just a young white kid from Oregon commanding these working-class kids from the ghetto."
Triage aboard the hospital ship and on the ground was the inverse of what we would expect. Those most severely wounded were put aside to later. The idea was to first fix up those who could return to the field and then attend to those who would never be able to. This created a dissonance in the hospital staff who realized their job was to simply fix a killing machine so it could go on killing rather than necessarily save lives, although they certainly did lots of that.
He was demobilized in 1970 after being wounded during battle. When he returned he was challenged by some protesters, who accused him of being a killer. Six weeks before he had indeed been killing as many as he could. "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 our troops. It shaped a generation, at least, and conditioned our response to things like Iraq and Afghanistan."
Marlantes has some interesting things to say about the reticence of veterans to talk of their experience at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIxekAmiyyA
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