FICTION: ANTHONY GLAVINreviews Matterhornby Karl Marlantes, Corvus/Grove, Altlantic, 602pp, £16.99
AMERICAN LITERATURE has its shelf of war stories – from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courageand Hemingway's A Farewell to Armsto Mailer's The Naked and the Deadand Tim O'Brien's T he Things They Carried– but likely none that took the 33 years that decorated US Marine veteran Karl Marlantes needed to bring his massive, curiously titled Vietnam War novel, Matterhorn, to heel. Curiously titled, that is, until we learn of the US military's practice, sans any apparent irony, of naming its hillside artillery support bases in Vietnam after neutral Switzerland's mountains. That said, Marlantes's over-long, yet ultimately compelling tale of the Marine riflemen of Bravo Company is both far too scrupulous and unrelentingly brutal in its forensic effort to make sense of a senseless war to have much truck with irony.
The novel opens with Waino Mellas, like Marlantes an Ivy League-educated Second Lieutenant from rural Oregon, taking command in 1969 of a Marine platoon charged with defending an artillery battery on Matterhorn, which they subsequently abandon, only to retake. Sited in jungle highlands near the Laotian border, the hill fairly comprises their entire war – about which none of them harbours any illusions. Marlantes is especially adept at depicting the daily, often tedious, operational minutiae of a rifle company, and the sweat and fear of jungle patrols –“one foot in front of the other in the endless dance of infantry”. What works less well, however, are some of the stage-managed non-combat set pieces, along with the occasionally wooden dialogue. But Marlantes is nothing short of superb in portraying the unimaginable terror, never mind carnage of sustained armed combat, wherein Lt Mellas meets up with “the mad monkey inside”– the savage fact that men in war can come to both desire and enjoy killing.
The real enemy in Matterhorn, however, is not the North Vietnamese Army, for whom Lt Mellas weeps when he encounters a young, mortally wounded NVA soldier, but rather the careerist, non-combatant higher command, personified by Col Simpson and Maj Blakely, whose naked ambition and incompetence tragically determine their strategic decisions. Why are we in Vietnam? – a question that provided the title of Norman Mailer's 1967 novel – is left aside by Marlantes, who glancingly refers to "the lie that had brought American troops to Vietnam", but chooses to target instead the workplace politics of a corporatist Marine Corps with its flow charts of command and bureaucratic behaviours. "We used to be against colonialism," Lt Mellas explains to a fellow Marine, "Now we're against communism." "Or Islamic extremism," some readers might be tempted to add, given the dispiriting parallels – whether faulty intelligence from so-called allies or the lack of any overall, clear-cut military objective – to the ongoing US war in Afghanistan. Unlike in the Korean war, territory – a hill such as Matterhorn – no longer matters so much as body count. "You worry about the numbers," Colonel Simpson advises his assistant, Major Blakely, touting his own "kill ratios" like sales quotas in a war that has become largely about attrition.
Marlantes also tellingly explores the racial divide that saw white, working-class American young men forced to interact far more closely with – never mind entrust their lives to – their black fellow Americans than most would have done back home. In one of the best non-combat scenes in the book, Jackson, a black Marine, gives Lt Mellas a canny tutorial on race relations, explaining how both whites and blacks are by necessity racist in America, but "some of us racists are prejudiced and some aren't". At the same time, African-Americans like Jackson were experiencing a radical 1960s' empowerment, typified by the Black Panthers movement, which saw the Vietnam War as " whitepeople sending blackpeople to fight yellowpeople to protect the country they stole from redpeople", a fertile sub-text which Marlantes skilfully weaves into a sub-plot that provides a climactic close to the novel.
Few war novels show what happens to non-combatants, and this one about a war in which an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians died, along with an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese military personnel, 660,000 South Vietnamese (ARVN), and just under 60,000 US soldiers, proves no exception. Nor do women feature, although wounded Lt Mellas is flown out to a hospital ship in the South China Sea where his encounter with a US Navy nurse, Karen, brings to mind Lt Henry's initial pas de deuxwith his British nurse, Catherine, in A Farewell to Arms. Brotherhood, instead, is Marlantes's abiding theme in yet another war novel that gives short shrift to patriotism, flag, and religion. Brotherhood being the only reason Mellas charges a NVA machine-gun bunker: "the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming" the friends and fellow Marines he loved. Semper Fidelis, the Marine Corps slogan which he had "always thought of as meaningless words in a dead language" is given "meaning and life" by his fallen comrades, and the novel closes with his men hauntingly chanting the names of their dead, "chanting about death, the only real god they knew".
That said, we are no wiser at the end as to why Lt Mellas himself had enlisted, though he might conceivably have been drafted had he not volunteered. What’s more, the novel’s heartfelt homage to loyalty and sacrifice in what Marlantes portrays as a meaningless firefight begs a question posed decades back by a once-vocal US anti-war movement: “What if they gave a war, and nobody came?” Marlantes has remarked on how he didn’t set out to write a pro- or anti-war novel, but anyone who reads the novel he did write is likely to think thrice about enlisting for combat – or for that matter allowing any brother, sister, son, daughter or friend to sign up either.
Anthony Glavin is a Boston-born short story writer and novelist, long living in Ireland. He served in the US Peace Corps in Central America from 1968 to 1970
