Eternal truth and consequences of combat - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Eternal truth and consequences of combat

Karl Marlantes’ first book, the Vietnam War novel “Matterhorn,” made the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the USA Today best-seller list and the Times’ “notable” list of 2010.

Nineteen months later, his second work — nonfiction — deserves equal acclaim.

Marlantes wrote “primarily to come to terms with my own experience of combat,” and his “reading, writing, [and] thinking” took three decades. “This is my song,” and his song’s for you. His lyricism should be mandatory reading for infantry recruits and residents of any nation that sends kids — Marlantes’ word — into combat.

The book is a “psychological and spiritual combat prophylactic, for indeed combat is like unsafe sex, a major thrill with possible horrible consequences” including “dead friends, dead enemies, waste, pain, [and] sorrow beyond imagining.”

Combat’s thrill is ephemeral, its consequence is everlasting, and the author’s candor is enlightening and sometimes devastating. “The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing,” he says.

The feeling is immediate when you are in the Vietnamese jungle — as thick as “wild blackberry patches that stand well above head high” — and is introspective when you are up to your neck in Carl Jung’s shadow of conflict, a darkness Marlantes describes well. His war experience started in 1969, but the book is not an aged whine. His writing is as fresh as Fallujah and Faryab.

Marlantes balances his story between physical action and intellectual accountability — psychological, ethical and spiritual — that he believes is necessary to understand the horror of combat.

He admits errors and successes, and his account of rolling down from a hilltop with an 18-year-old wounded Marine is harrowing:

“I turned him sideways on the hill and flung myself forward on top of him. I wrapped my arms and legs around him and our rifles, rolling with him, embracing him as the machine gun bullets were slamming into the dirt all around us.” At the bottom a medic finds “a neat hole in the top of [the Marine’s] skull.” Is the deadly hole from enemy fire or from Marlantes’ protective fire? “I’ll never know.”

He knows other things. His research and rationale form a voice of reason with a reason to be heard.

“There will be those who will fear that doing such things will undermine the ‘killer instincts’ of the troops. Well, if the war is a stupid one, it probably will. If it’s not, I wouldn’t worry.”

Those who support the troops will read this book and will better understand what it is like to go to — and come back from — war.

J. Ford Huffman is a Military Times book reviewer.