Mud, blood and jungle rot

The Matterhorn, at 14,679 feet in the Alps, is said to be very difficult to climb. It is an apt military designation for a (fictional) jungle peak that United States Marines were ordered to assault, abandon and assault once more, against fierce opposition, to establish an artillery base near the North Vietnamese border during the Vietnam war. Matterhorn is also a suitable title for a formidable epic novel, which is arduous reading but well worth taking on, especially if there is any need for further testimony that war is a criminal waste of time, money and men. About 60,000 Americans died in Vietnam to prove the point. It is being demonstrated again, with carefully limited casualties, in Afghanistan, but even greater expense and popular misgivings.

Karl Marlantes, a hero in Vietnam (Navy Cross, Bronze Star, two Navy commendations for valour), is proud to have been a Marine and says he is not a pacifist. However, the story he has based on his own experience in Vietnam, which has taken 30 years to write and rewrite, amounts to a persuasive pacifist tract. Any close-up, detailed, objective description of infantry in action reveals horrors and absurdities which make one wonder why the species at the top of the food chain is uniquely so self-destructive.

Marlantes, son of an Oregon small-town schoolteacher, enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of 18, but was allowed to continue his education before active service. At Yale, he won a Rhodes Scholarship, and could have stayed at Oxford long enough to avoid Vietnam, but the thought of his contemporaries there made it impossible for him not to join them. Similarly, the protagonist of Matterhorn, Waino Mellas, spends four years at an Ivy League university, Princeton, before voluntarily going to Vietnam as a Second Lieutenant, USMC, to command a platoon in the worst of the fighting.