Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

There is a sort of perfomative contradiction in war novels. Books like these attempt to show what war is like, to bring the reader into the experience. But even the best authors can never quite succeed, and they must cede that war is unknowable by those who have not made war, and that the experience must remain lost to the uninitiated. Given this striving, it is no wonder that war novels proliferate, and no wonder that those that come closest spend so many pages soldiering on, bravely trying to put the unutterable into words.

In Matterhorn, Vietnam-veteran and debut-novelist Karl Marlantes does his damnedest to bring us there. And though we find his characters unable to relate the reality of combat, Marlantes never stops trying and what he accomplishes is amazing.

After all, Mellas had a patch over one eye, several boxes of cigars under his arm, and a sword hanging from a complicated strap over his shoulder.

Finally, the driver could contain himself no longer. “Where’d you get the sword?” he asked.

Mellas was amused. “Out in the bush” he said.

“Ah.”

There were some things he couldn’t tell the uninitiated. For them, the bush should, and would, remain a mystery.

Of course, we have been let in on the secret of what happened in the bush. We know how a kid called Vancouver had died using the sword to take a useless hill that had been abandoned before, and which would be abandoned again after it had been retaken. We know, moreover, what it had taken Mellas to recover the sword from the hospital ship he had been put on for nearly losing an eye. We know, many pages later, what had happened, but the way Mellas couldn’t even tell an Army driver what it was like means that we couldn’t possibly have known what it was like either. We know what happened, but we can only wonder at whatever it was that kept Mellas from explaining.

The action of Matterhorn centers around this Second Lieutenant Mellas, on his first tour of duty in Vietnam, and the soldiers who make up his immediate circle. We first meet him digging into Matterhorn (so called because of a fashion in naming firebases after Alpine mountains), an otherwise insignificant hill near the border with North Vietnam and Laos.

The core of the novel is comprised of these two combat operations – first leaving the hill in a futile march, and then retaking the hill in what amounts to a mad charge. Men die, of course, and by the end, almost everyone the reader has come to know has been killed in some way or other. But even without war, people die, and often as inexplicably. But death has a way of bringing the living together.

What little the author lacks as a crafter of prose, he makes up for in his ability to propel his story along, and to move the reader through hell and mud. There are well-placed flashbacks to Mellas’s civilian life and the way his going away to war destroyed his relationship with his girlfriend which develop a riveting contrast to the world of combat, magnifying the suspense.

What holds Mellas together in this hail of blood and war politics is the loyalty he develops to Bravo Company. He has lived, trudged, fought, with this dwindling group of young men. He has saved their lives, and they’ve saved his. Like a warrior, Mellas notes, “Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live.” But this necessary bond also creates an extra moral burden carried by junior officers. Lieutenant Fitch, the company commander, at one point has to order several wounded soldiers off saline to be redistributed to the company to stave off dehydration. The choice was obvious, given the circumstances. Obvious or not, Fitch’s direct order caused one man to die and another to live only long enough to be evacuated to a hospital ship.

Aboard this hospital ship, surrounded by nurses and others who would never see real combat up close, the rules shift away from survival to a strict adherence to protocol. While quite military, the hospital ship is decidedly not the bush; it is not the battlefield. Mellas gets Vancouver’s sword taken from him when he gets checked in, and only gets it back by begging a nurse for it, by desperately trying to tell her about that sword. Even then, he can’t quite get across what it was like – that the supposedly silly souvenir sword was important because what had landed it in his hands was important. Someone had died.

Reviewed by James Liu

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010.
Cloth, 592 pp, $24.95
ISBN-13: 9780802119285