The Vietnam Wars: ‘Matterhorn’

Every war novel must at some point confront a central contradiction. Only the truth has any real value, but the truth about war is that it contains nearly unbearable levels of repetition, boredom and meaninglessness. To write honestly about war, you should make readers feel they have endured those things as well. Yet no sane novelist wants to inflict that much discomfort on the audience. And so we read novels (and watch movies) filled with the kind of bravery and drama that make war look at least entertaining, if not admirable. Many of those works are tremendous artistic achievements. But they’re not war.

Karl Marlantes’s first novel, “Matterhorn,” is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes ­— a highly decorated Vietnam vet — spent 30 years writing this book. It was originally 1,600 pages long; now it is 600. Reading his account of the bloody folly surrounding the Matterhorn outpost, you get the feeling Marlantes is not overly worried about the attention span of his readers; you get the feeling he was not desperate or impatient to be published. Rather, he seems like a man whose life was radically altered by war, and who now wants to pass along the favor. And with a desperate fury, he does. 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 — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered.

The story is told from the point of view of a young second lieutenant, Mellas, who joined the Marines for confused and vaguely patriotic reasons that are quickly left in tatters by military incompetence. At great psychic and physical cost, Mellas and the rest of Bravo Company, Fifth Marine Division, climb a steep mountain near the intersection of Laos and the DMZ separating North and South Vietnam, then build an outpost capable of withstanding enemy artillery. As soon as they finish, they are told to abandon it because they are needed for a large operation farther south. There ensues a multiweek stagger through impenetrable jungle, the company plagued by lack of food, lack of ammunition and inadequate resupply. One man is killed by a tiger. Another dies of cerebral malaria. Starving to death and bearing a dead friend on a pole, the men of Bravo Company finish their mission and are allowed a brief rest at one of the main support bases.

Soon enough, however, they are ordered to retake Matterhorn, which has since been occupied by the enemy. It is there, on the flanks of their own outpost, that the horror and absurdity of war are finally played out. “After three hours of debate they finally realized that there was no perfect plan,” Marlantes writes as the company plots its assault. “Somebody was going to get killed.” The battle scenes are vivid, devastating and vaguely repetitious — surprisingly, the only parts of the book where my mind started to wander. But combat is not really what “Matterhorn” is about; it is about war. And in Marlantes’s hands, war is a confusing and rich world where some men die heroically, others die because of bureaucratic stupidity, and a few are deliberately killed by platoon-mates bearing a grudge. In one of the more remarkable passages of the book, Mellas contemplates the killing that goes on in nature and struggles with the question of whether it is evil:

“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.”

Even the book’s infrequent flaws sometimes serve a valuable purpose in its narrative. There is a blizzard of names, ranks and military terms, for instance, and despite the glossary and unit schematic included in the book, I still felt lost much of the time. That confusion, however, was exactly my experience while covering the United States military as a journalist, and in “Matterhorn” it struck me as annoying but true. Elsewhere there are some familiar moments, including a Tim O’Brien-type accounting of the contents of a man’s rucksack, and an awkward scene of post-traumatic stress on a hospital ship that feels a little forced. But when Marlantes hits it right — which is most of the time — he can lay you out like a boxer with a killer jab.

“The light died. Voices were silenced. Darkness and fear replaced light and reason,” he writes about the outpost at night. Fear is like a “strong electric potential with no place to discharge,” and the preparation for combat puts men in an emotional state where even other soldiers can’t reach them: “The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world — a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life.”

One of the most heartbreaking themes of the book is the racial tension between black troops and white troops — a tension that boils over into outright threats and eventually murder. For a reporter who has covered the military in its current incarnation, the events recounted in this book are so brutal and costly that they seem to belong not just to another time but to an­other country. Soldiers openly contemplate killing their commanders. They die by the dozen on useless missions designed primarily to help the careers of those above them. The wounded are unhooked from IV bags and left to die because others, required for battle, are growing woozy from dehydration and have been ordered to drink the precious fluid. Almost every page contains some example of military callousness or incompetence that would be virtually inconceivable today, and I found myself wondering whether the book was intended as an indictment of war in general or a demonstration of just how far this nation has come in the last 40 years.

One is left feeling that facile comparisons of Afghanistan to Vietnam amount to a mockery of Vietnam. I don’t know if that was the author’s intention, but it is a helpful note during America’s anguished debate about what to do in the war we’re fighting now. “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.