It has been a long time since a novel was so compelling I hated to put in down and yearned to pick it up again as soon as I could. This is "Matterhorn." It has nothing to do with that fabled mountain in the Swiss Alps which attracts professional climbers every summer. It is a story about a hill in Vietnam that a company of Marines took, abandoned, and re-took in 1969.
I picked up this novel about the same time I was watching the ten-part HBO series "The Pacific," the heroic struggle of the United States Marines during World War II. I was struck by the similarities in both wars.
The author, Karl Marlantes, a graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar, served as a Marine in Vietnam. He was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts and ten air medals. He brings to this first novel a wealth of first-hand experience about men in war. One wonders if Matterhorn is more auto-biographical than imaginary. In any event it ranks very high among the tales told of the Vietnam experience which I have read over the years. Marlantes says he worked on this, his first novel, for thirty years.
This gritty tale has been widely praised and nit-pickingly criticized. Some thought it over-written; others get hung-up on little things like explaining the military lingo in the narrative despite a glossary of weapons, technical terms, slang and jargon, in the back of the book. I did not find this distracting. To the contrary, it helps the uninformed understand immediately without having to flip back and forth.
The one thing I believe comes straight at you is the oft told tale about why men fight as they do in battle. They aren't fighting down on the ground in Vietnam for some noble purpose laid down by politicians back home (stop the spread of Communism) or by senior officers way behind the lines (body counts are a measure of progress); they are fighting for their lives and the man at their side.
The perspective of the "snuff" (a young Marine of low rank) is always going to be different from that of the career senior officers, "lifers" – quite often a derogatory term implying one who puts career, military rules and decorum above the welfare of the troops. In between these two groups are the young 2nd lieutenants who live and die with the snuffs but are charged by their seniors to lead them to fight.
The battalion commander drinks too much for anyone in charge of troops and is quick off of the mark to find fault and suspect the worst. Marlantes gives us hope at the regiment and division level. The future is not addressed in the novel, but it is reasonable to expect that very shortly an officer's fitness report will put the battalion commander out to pasture.
In Vietnam this hierarchical system worked as it has for two-hundred years. It never is pretty, but the job gets done and young Americans rise to the occasion over and over again.
It is not going to happen but every American ought to read this tale and imagine himself in the First Squad, First Platoon. Matterhorn will not be a novel you will quit on half-way through. To do so would be deserting the boys in the sweltering mountains and jungle of Vietnam.
