Waino Mellas is fresh off his Princeton graduation with plans of law school, politics, and maybe public office. Just one obligation stands in his way . . . that pesky ROTC gig, so it's off to OCS and a few years in the Marine Corps. One problem:
it's 1969,
and that means Vietnam.
But that can't be so bad, can it? Being a combat vet could only help his career ambitions. Manage a platoon for a few months. Maybe even get a company. Maybe even a medal or two. Just 13 months then leave the bush behind and head back to life.
Mellas is assigned a platoon in the NW corner of Vietnam within spitting distance of Laos and the DMZ. 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division stationed at Matterhorn. They've cleared the vegetation off the top and dug in excellent defenses. Sure there is the occasional mortar shell or sniper, but nothing that can't be handled by the more experienced platoon leaders.
A few weeks pass and Mellas has to lead his platoon on patrol. Careful, slow walk through the jungle that is stopped frequently when the man on point gets nervous. Out a couple days. No real contact with the NVA or evidence of their presence.
But what Mellas does learn, and pretty quickly, is that the Marines is not just a bunch of gung ho hard chargers. And leadership is not just leading men into battle. He has to be part social worker, part counselor, part platoon nurse, part bad ass lieutenant, part befuddled rookie. He faces overt racial divides, internal class warfare, black on black, white on black, black on white racism, cowardice, bravery, malingerers, black power, crotch rot, malaria, immersion foot, gangrene, unfathomable fatigue, hatred of commanding officers to the point of plotting murder, hunger, diarrhea, and dehydration in the middle of monsoon season. But not before one of his men is mauled in the jungle by a tiger and his men have to carry his stinking remains back to Matterhorn for processing back to the states.
The brass wants a new firebase set up and Bravo Company is ordered to abandon Matterhorn and hump it to the new location in maybe 3 days. But the brass obviously can't read a map's topo lines or the weather forecast; the hump takes more like 7 days and the company packed rations for the expected 3 days in the bush. And the weather is so bad that copters can't fly in food or water - make do says the brass, sooner you get to the destination, the sooner you can rest and eat.
Prick.
They arrive, get a little rest and start the process of building a new firebase. Guess what, the brass are now sure that the NVA have settled into the old Matterhorn base and have ordered Bravo Company (and more) to go, determine the strength of the force and retake Matterhorn because from there the Marines can monitor and disrupt NVA supply lines coming into Vietnam from Laos.
The resulting assault on Matterhorn is brutal, full of fear, shit pants, mud, tears, rationed water and ammo, and heroism that would never make the papers in the US, but would become the stuff of legend to the mud crawling grunt in the bush.
And all for what? To take back a stinking hilltop that only weeks before they had held. The brass seems less concerned about the condition of the troops than they are about the body count so the Generals could puff their collective chests in what was not a war based on territory, but a war of attrition. Kill so many that the NVA will run out of manpower (And we bought this as a strategy?).
I read that it took Marlantes upwards of 20 years of on and off again writing to complete his manuscript. Writers are told to write about what they know. Marlantes was a decorated Marine in Vietnam (Navy Cross, Bronze Star, 2 Navy Commendation Medals for valor, 2 Purple Hearts, 10 Air Medals). The real genius behind this story is Marlantes' ability to assemble his collective memory (notes? diary?) into this massive epic (~600 pages, 2012 copyright) narrative of Vietnam.
One would expect that a Vietnam novel would be filled with firefights, tunnel rats, B-girls, and more battles. Marlantes takes his time introducing the reader to the key Bravo Company players and it's probably 150 pages in before any real hostilities (at least against the NVA) happen. Other than that brief fight, Marlantes spends upwards of the first 400 pages about the boredom, start/stop, mud, hunger, thirst, pus-oozing skin diseases, blood-sucking leeches (one up a urethra) and more that was almost as much of an enemy as were the NVA.
While those 400-ish pages could never be called 'slow,' once the assault on Matterhorn begins, Marlantes takes us all for a massive 150+ page encounter that roars so loud and rolls so fast that the involved reader can see the tracers headed their way, hear the thump of mortar shots, cringe at the NVA taunting the Marines when they capture a squad's radio, cry when soldiers we've become to see as friends trip a mine and get cut in half, wonder if a Marine's death was due to friendly fire . . . I can still see images in my mind.
Having graduated high school in 1967, I grew up in fear of the draft and Vietnam (no, didn't go. #314 draft lottery number) and learned not to ask friends who I know were there about combat; I wasn't there, I would never understand. My son-in-law's stepfather was a 1965-era Green Beret stationed near the DMZ and all he would tell me was snippets about political restrictions put on them by Washington. Matterhorn is probably the closest that those of us who didn't go will ever get to what the down-in-the-mud grunt experienced.
I'm sure that some will compare this to Oliver Stone's Platoon, considered to be one of the great anti-war movies ever. I thought Platoon was a morality play set in war and Matterhorn probably is, too. But I see Matterhorn giving us more about what the soldiers faced, good and bad, while being stationed in the shit. The tag line for Platoon was something like, "in war, the first casualty is innocence." Matterhorn may also be, but it is also about anger, jealousy, racism, politics, hatred, unrelenting fear, and love for the guy whom you just dug your fighting hole. Just survive one more night and we are one day closer to going home.
Apologies to Marlantes because I have left dozens and dozens of subplots unsaid and probably have mis-stated some of the plot points I did mention. Just because I left many out doesn't make them any less uninteresting or unimportant. They are all connected in this complex, but highly readable and visible 3-D web.
East Coast Don
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