Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Karl Marlantes's 35-year struggle to write a true novel of the Vietnam war has finally paid off – 'Matterhorn' is a bestseller
By Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday 11 July 2010 

 Matterhorn
by Karl Marlantes
592pp,Corvus,£16.99

In the summer of 1970, Karl Marlantes, a recently demobilised Vietnam veteran posted to US Marine Corps headquarters after 13 months of highly decorated active service, found himself walking some sensitive military papers across to the Capitol. He was challenged by a group of young anti-war protesters "hollering obscenities", chanting "babykiller" and waving north Vietnamese flags.
"I was stunned and hurt," he recalls, speaking to me during a recent visit to London. "I thought, you have no idea who I am… yes, I wanted to shoot them. Six weeks before, I was killing North Vietnamese guerrillas in combat." As his immediate rage moderated into puzzled anguish, Marlantes found himself wanting "to explain myself to those kids. I just wanted to tell my story".

So he began to work on his Vietnam novel, taking a title, "Some Desperate Glory", from a line in Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est". The national trauma of the war was dragging on and he intended to address something huge in the life of contemporary America. "The Vietnam war was a defining experience in the US," he says. "It made this incredible divide, even within families. The Democrats were anti-war and the Republicans supported our troops. It shaped a generation, at least, and conditioned our response to things like Iraq and Afghanistan."
By 1977, Marlantes had completed a massive, first-person narrative, full, he says, of "psychobabble" and an unmediated bitterness that he's now embarrassed to contemplate. No publisher would touch it. So he went back to a second draft, and a third…
Finally, 35 years after he first sat down at his manual typewriter – by now divorced and in his 60s – he completed the novel that's called Matterhorn, a debut that has been hailed by American critics as the definitive Vietnam novel of our times – "One of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam" (New York Times).

The title is derived from the codename for a remote, mountainous military outpost, a "firebase", near the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam and the Laos border, not unlike the notorious Hill 937, or Hamburger Hill. "Matterhorn" becomes a killing field for the young marines of Bravo Company, as they repeatedly try to secure a patch of Vietcong ground. They are led by a young second lieutenant named Waino Mellas, who has much in common with Marlantes: an Ivy League graduate from rural Oregon who adheres to the values of his childhood rather than the smart, east coast radicalism of his Princeton roommates. Mellas volunteers for the Marine Corps and, wet behind the ears, takes command of a platoon in the north-west corner of South Vietnam during the rainy season of 1969, just as Marlantes did. "All second lieutenants in history are the same," he says. "I was just a young white kid from Oregon commanding these working-class kids from the ghetto."
McCrum's full piece at The Observer.