Monday, June 13, 2011

Hearts of Darkness

Title: Matterhorn, A Novel of the Vietnam War
Author: Karl Marlantes
Publisher: Grove Press

Rating: 4/5

The real horror of war is not that it is horrible, but that it is horribly banal, taking rage, murder, filth and despair and making them commonplace. That it is neither more nor less stupid and senseless than everything else the human race does. That it repeats itself ad nauseam, like tinnitus after an explosion, or a single act of homicide on an endlessly repeating loop.

In "Matterhorn", a semi-autobiographical story of the Vietnam war, first-time author and ex-Marine Karl Marlantes brings this message to vivid, messy life, focusing on a futile battle in a futile war.

Marching along death's mobius strip come 2nd Lieutenant Waino Mellas and the Marines of Bravo Company, as they spend several exhausting weeks building an artillery base on a hilltop code-named "Matterhorn", only to be told to abandon it and march through the jungle—beset by hunger, disease, wildlife—to another hill to set up another base. This, too, they soon quit, before being ordered back to attack Matterhorn, which has in the interim predictably been occupied by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

"It was all absurd, without reason or meaning," thinks Mellas just before the attack, a sentiment that could serve as a coda for the entire book. "People who didn't even know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about."

For most of the book though, the NVA prove enemies more in theory than fact. Far more deadly are the hatreds between black and white soldiers, the petty office politics between the commander of the battalion and the leader of Bravo Company, the callousness and greed of rear-area personnel. "'No matter where you go, it's still high school'" says Mellas. After being wounded, Mellas suffers more at the hands of kleptomaniac orderlies than he ever does at the hands of the NVA. It is almost a relief to return to the front lines and his unit.

The book ends shortly after, but you already know what will happen next—another march, another hill, another battle. There is no catharsis or epiphany, only resignation. "It was another cycle, another wearying convulsive rhythm, and if it wasn't Mellas it was (his friend) McCarthy, and if not McCarthy someone like McCarthy, forever and forever, like an image in facing mirrors in a barbershop."

The writing feels raw rather than polished, despite the novel's reported 30-year gestation period. Tension builds, then suddenly evaporates. The team scales a mountain, deadly vulnerable to enemy fire, when... they reach the top, unscathed. The characters too are prone to sudden shifts in personality, here nervous newcomer, here swearing old-timer.

In a way though, these rough edges work to the novel's benefit. War is not a story arc, but a staccato series of incidents, and so the plot feels like a true reflection of the experiences of Mellas and his men. Characters do not develop so much as dissolve, individual tics erased under a barrage of four-letter words, but this too feels believable, and you can easily imagine after months of combat those around you blurring into an undifferentiated, swearing, sullen mass.

In the tradition of James Jones's "Thin Red Line" or Wofgang Petersen's "Das Boot", this is a work that leaves you emotionally numbed but intellectually charged. The pointlessness of it is the point. "He knew all of them were shadows," thinks Mellas. "The dead, the living. All shadows ... changing the pattern of things as the moved but leaving nothing changed when they left."

And that, above all else, is the true horror of war.