Sebastien's Reviews > Matterhorn

This is a book about the Vietnam War, following 2nd lieutenant Waino Mellas and his fellow soldiers. It is grim, gruesome, intense, touching, and more. I had the feeling things might get intense based on the opening sequence of a soldier dealing with a leech burrowing its way into and inside his private parts. That's ominous. I also didn't know leeches could do that.

The writing is excellent, but most impressive to me was the dialogue. There are a diversity of characters depicted, and I felt Marlantes did them justice, captured their essence via dialogue that felt sharp, real, true. And via the dialogue, he seems to paint an accurate picture of the race and class dynamics of the US's fighting force in Vietnam. The relationships between the characters was also revealing and well-done, capturing the complexities of different people relating (and sometimes not) to one another.

I haven't read many books on the Vietnam War. I actually decided to pick this one up as I was watching the recent PBS Vietnam War Documentary. Marlantes was one of the interviewees and he struck me as an interesting person, and in looking him up I discovered he was a writer. Can't tell you how happy I was to stumble across his work.

The thing that's struck me with a lot of the WWI memoirs I've read, and this book falls into this as well: they showcase wars where many soldiers lost complete trust in their superiors and lost their conviction in regards to the purpose of the broader mission. And in those cases, war takes on an even greater absurdity, curdling into a Kafkaesque hell (moreso than it already is at base level). The loss of purpose makes everything all the more maddening.

In this book the moment that best captures this: superiors want to capture a hill. Demand the soldiers capture a hill. After much intense fighting, many losses, the hill is finally taken from the enemy. Shortly thereafter the superiors order it to be abandoned. Capturing the hill as it turns out served no strategic purpose, merely meant as a means to increase body count (one of those ridiculous metrics used in Vietnam) and add a feather on the cap of the superior running the mission but otherwise completely pointless. And then some time later, sometimes weeks, months, soldiers are once again sent to capture that very same hill. They capture it again, and it is the same story, they are once again ordered to abandon it... This circular absurdity is one of those stories that keeps popping up with the Vietnam War.