Book review: “Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War” by Karl Marlantes

By my count, Karl Marlantes mentions the word “fear” or some synonym of it at least sixty times in his 2010 novel about the Vietnam War called Matterhorn, or about once every ten pages.

When Second Lt. Waino Mellas and the other Marines in Bravo Company are out in the bush, it often appears on every other page or even more frequently. Such as this moment when Mellas has diarrhea:

Then he heard a scrape. He squatted there, the shitty paste running down his thighs, too frozen with terror to move or make a sound.

Or at this moment when the shrapnel of a grenade has torn off the throat of Lance Corporal Jacobs, Mellas is pushing to stop the bleeding from his carotid artery:

Jacobs could make no sound. Only his eyes could express the terror of that last moment.

Mellas cried out and shoved his filthy fist against the severed carotid artery, trying to staunch the blood. Then the light went from Jacobs’s eyes and the terror vanished.

Or at this moment when the Marines under Mellas’s command are charging at a North Vietnamese entrenchment, and Mellas “watched soft flesh run against hot metal” and Mellas knew what he had to do:

Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched everything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him.

 

“Some are chosen”

As the novel opens, it is late 1968, and Mellas, newly graduated from Princeton and basic training, is the commander of a rifle platoon of 40 Marines, one of three in a company of about 200. He has 390 days to go on his tour in Vietnam, 13 months. He is one of three rookie second lieutenants in charge of the three platoons.

He was still in a delicate position: nominally in charge of the patrol, because he was the platoon commander, but until he was successfully broken in he was also under the others of Lieutenant Fitch, the company commander, to do everything Fisher said.

Fisher is the platoon’s seasoned corporal.  Mellas has replaced Lt. Ted Hawke, promoted to executive officer of the company. Hawke went to college, he later explains, at “C to the Fourth,” Cape Cod Community College, and U Mass. The company is stationed at a hill called Matterhorn, one of several named for one of the Alps.

Hawke is 22. Mellas, about 21. The corporals, such as Fisher and Connolly, called Conman, are younger, and the other Marines, younger still, are referred to, on page after page, as “kids.”

The kids

The kids follow orders. The officers and non-coms give orders. Death or gruesome injury can happen at any moment to any one.

Even unburdened of their packs, they moved very slowly. The tiniest sounds rang out like bells. Unseen branches slapped at their eyes. The cold fog enveloped them. The kids cursed beneath their breath as they groped for the ground in front of them.

At one point, Mellas needs to send a fire team forward into the thick jungle growth to investigate an apparent North Vietnamese presence, and he asks Conman, “Who do you want to go?”

Now it was Conman’s turn to play God, at age nineteen. He shut his eyes. “Rider.”

So some are chosen to die young.

Mellas turned to Skosh. “Rider up.” Skosh crawled back toward the next man. “Rider up.” The whisper passed along.

 

Beauty to its bleakness

Matterhorn is a bleak novel about an intensely bleak, fierce and frightening experience shared by young men who only have each other for support.

There is a beauty to its bleakness in the ability of Marlantes to capture the humanity of Melas and the men he is with, fighting a war that, in terms of the physical, is constant, ever-present and ever-deadly but, in terms of value, seems empty of meaning.

And the danger isn’t only from the enemy. During an early reconnaissance, one of Mellas’s Marines, Williams, is attacked and eaten by a tiger. What remains of his body is wrapped up in his poncho and is being carried back by his squad, including his friend Cortell

On the third night Cortell crawled to the body and put his hands on the lump that was the head. “Williams, I’m sorry. I might have done somethin’ but run. I didn’t know. I was so scared. You know how scared you can get. You and me been scared like that. You know. I’m sorry, Williams. Oh, Jesus. I’m so sorry.” Cortell started to sob.

Jackson, in the next hole, crawled across the ground and gently pulled Cortell away from the body, urging him silently back into his fighting hole, getting him to stop.  The sobs could be heard too clearly, delineating the perimeter’s position.

And truly, on the fourth day, what was slung beneath the pole had no soul. It stank.

 

“People he loved”

Often accompanying Mellas’s platoon are Arran and his dog Pat to help with the scouting. Arran has recently re-upped.

He squatted down and grabbed Pat on both sides of his jowls, putting his face right into Pat’s nose, moving it back and forth….He stood again. It was well known that Arran had extended his tour twice because the scout dog couldn’t be transferred to other handlers, and when their tour was over, they were killed. Someone back in the world had declared them too dangerous to bring home.

Matterhorn is 566 pages, and 175 of those pages are taken up by a single intense battle over the course of several days in and around the Matterhorn hill.

As his Marines are running to be ready for the helicopters to drop them into the fight, Melas is recalling a college discussion about “the stupidity of warriors and their silly codes of honor” and pondering the Marine motto, Semper Fi (Semper Fidelis, “Always Faithful”).

Now, seeing the Marines run across the landing zone, Mellas knew he could never join that cynical laughter again. Something had changed. People he loved were going to die to give meaning and life to what he’d always thought of as meaningless words in a dead language.

 

“His most secret parts”

But, always, the fear. The terror. The dread.

During one battle, Mellas is constantly fantasizing of sneaking away from the danger, but he laughs at the futility of such thinking.

The laughter turned him inside out, exposing his most secret parts. He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear…

Stripped to a scream, undressed to a cry of pain, he sobbed his anger at God in hoarse words that hurt his throat….Then he cried, but his cries were the rage and hurt of a newborn child, at last, however roughly, being taken from the womb.

 

“If it’s good enough”

And through it all, there is the awareness in every Marine that “some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life.”

And the knowledge that they are going through this bleak, intense, fierce experience together.

On the second to the last page of the book, Mellas can hear, in the darkness of the base, a chant:

They were chanting the names of the dead.

 

If it’s good enough for Jacobs, then it’s good enough for me.

If it’s good enough for Jacobs, then it’s good enough for me.

If it’s good enough for Jacobs, then it’s good enough for me.

Good enough for me. Good enough for me.

 

The voices chanted on. With each new name the rhythm would be altered to fit the syllables.

It is only in these final pages of the novel that the reader realizes that the intense, fierce, bleak story that Marlantes has just told is far from over.

In its 566 pages, Matterhorn has told of Mellas and the men around him going through a grim, harsh and brutal non-stop experience of war, and, for all those pages, the reader has gone along.

Now, with the book ending, the reader is done. Not Mellas. It is February, 1969. The book has covered his first three months in Vietnam.

He still has ten more months to go.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

4.14.26