MATTERHORN by Karl Marlantes - Reviewed by Gary Carden

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press
$24.95 - 600 pages

“It took Karl Marlantes 30 years to write his thunderous, brutally granular account of scorched-earth combat in Vietnam. Matterhorn was originally published by a tiny press in California before a prominent New York editor caught up to it, and now this 600-page beast of a novel is loose in the wider world, taut as a trip wire and reeking of gunpowder. It tells the story of a green second lieutenant named Mellas and his education in terror and suffering over the course of a few deadly weeks as he and his companions take, abandon and then try to retake a sheer mountain deep in the jungle. “
- Time magazine, December 20, 2010


In many ways, this is one of the most terrifying novels that I have ever read. This is largely due to the fact that Marlantes drops the reader onto a kind of treadmill that moves him (and Bravo Company) unrelentingly through a green hell of rain and fog towards oblivion/death.There is no turning around, and although you (the reader) may object to being forced at gun point down a one-way path, it is pointless to resist. No one is listening. As the sound of exploding mortars increase, you find yourself experiencing a flood of unpleasant tactile sensations - jungle rot that covers the skin with puss-filled sores, leeches that drop from the trees down your shirt and immediately become bloated from sucking your blood; infected feet, physical exhaustion and chills produced by hunger and dehydration. The soldiers around you begin to shout sensing that an unavoidable confrontation is at hand ... and you have a loaded M-16.

In the final analysis, the “you are there” aspect of Matterhorn constitutes one of the reasons (and there are many!) why this is a great novel. Certainly, there have been a good number of respectable, well-researched novels (Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, James Webb’s Fields of Fire, for example) on the Vietnam conflict, but Karl Marlantes’ 600 page opus (edited down from 1,600 pages) is destined to be what the New York Times calls “the final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history.” In addition to the compelling writing, Matterhorn has a panoramic, Wagnerian vastness that encompasses everything from “war room” strategy meetings of the commanding officers to the racial conflicts that frequently threaten to destroy Bravo Company from within.

However, Mariantes’ greatest gift is his talent for creating a large cast of characters who emerge like images in a photographer’s darkroom - images that begin as vague shapes that gradually acquire features and personality: the charismatic Jawhawk’s red mustache, Vancouver, the Canadian machine gunner, who carried a Japanese ceremonial sword; Corporal Jancowitz, who has fallen in love with a bar girl in Bangkok and re-enlisted to be near her; China, the Black Panther advocate; the timid Jacobs, who stutters, the small, ineffectual “Shortround” Pollini and a marvelous dog named Pat - doomed to be killed when he has served his purpose in Vietnam. Over one hundred vivid characters, each unique ...but all flawed by humanity. There seems to be a terrible injustice in the fact that just as the reader begin to care about them, laughing at their quips and condemning their failings, they are suddenly gone, reduced to rotten, inert bundles wrapped in green shrouds and awaiting shipment home.

Much of Matterhorn’s three-week journey through sustained madness and horror is seen through the eyes of Second Lieutenant Waino Mallas, an ambitious Princeton graduate who initially perceives his Vietnam tour as a politically desirable experience in his anticipated career as a lawyer. At first, Mallas is viewed with suspicion and contempt by many of the members of Bravo company because of his ivy-league background. In addition, he quickly gains a reputation for being short-tempered and contentious. However, in a matter of days, as he is subjected to starvation, inadequate supplies, bureaucratic stupidity and bloodshed, he begins to suspect that there is something profoundly wrong with this war. The conflict involves “people who didn’t know each other” but were destined “ to kill each other over a hill that none of them cared about.”

That hill, Matterhorn, is a bleak mountain in South Vietnam between Laos and the DMZ,which owes its name to the American command’s penchant for naming Vietnamese elevations after mountains in Switzerland. During the three weeks encompassed by this novel, Matterhorn is invaded by Bravo company, fortified, abandoned, occupied by the North Vietnamese and then retaken (at a tremendous cost) by Bravo. Shrouded in a thick fog that renders air support ineffectual, the members of Mallas’ company spend much of their time staring at the impenetrable fog, straining to hear the sound of an approaching heliocopter “like members of a cargo cult.” Unable to transport their dead and wounded, or to acquire food, water and ammunition, Bravo company spends much of its time in a kind of frozen limbo.

As Bravo company waits for food, water or the next attack, they attempt to communicate with each other. These intervals of exchange - whimsically “playing the dozens,” disputes over musical taste, debates on the nature of Good and Evil (“Are we murderers or patriots?”) and the current status of the Black Panther movement in the states - constitute the heart of Matterhorn. Ironically, these dialogues fall into two categories: those that analyze racism, God and “the human condition” with remarkable clarity, and those that spark confrontations that push Bravo company’s smoldering racism close to open rebellion.

This dichotomy suggests that war, despite its inhumanity, provides an insight into human nature that is not normally apparent. Sources as diverse as Hemingway and Joseph Campbell have noted that humanity often “transcends” its inherent flaws when it is confronted with death. Second Lieutenant Mallas not only witnesses acts of heroism but is astonished to find himself participating in them. These are acts that attest to the bond of brotherhood that seems to surface on the battlefield. This “bond,” for lack of a better term is love, a profound caring that is evident when Mallas watches officers send enlisted men into battle “the way a mother prepares her children before they leave for school.” However, once the danger is past, Bravo company reverts to a burgeoning frustration and rage that often fosters a desire to turn on the inept, career-motivated officers who send them on missions in which they die without purpose or meaning.

Matterhorn’s extensive use of jargon, military slang and technical terms would render much of the action and dialogue meaningless if the author had not provided an extensive “Glossary.” It is here that you learn that COORS, means “Killed in action,” FRAGGING is an attempt to kill a fellow officer with a grenade; KIT CARSONS are North Vietnamese deserters who work as “scouts” for the American forces; and a MYSTERY TOUR is a prolonged drunken party. The reader will also learn that most of the “grunts” carry packages of Wylers lemon, grape Koolade, Choo-Choo Cherry and Tabasco sauce to enrich the taste of K-rations and chemically-tainted water. Also, most of Bravo’s officers carry elaborately-carved walking sticks as a means of calculating how many days, weeks or months remain in their tour of duty.

Like all war novels, Matterhorn will be compared to its predecessors. Admittedly, I thought of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead when I encountered graphic descriptions of death and decay. I also found a bit of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in many episodes when Mallas, like Yosarrian, encounters nightmarish events that contain a dark and grisly humor (such as a “death by Tiger” episode). However, such comparisons are superficial at best. Finally, the novel, Matterhorn, like the bleak and enigmatic mountain it represents, stands alone.

In a recent email, this reviewer received a poem written by Edward Micus a Vietnam vet who sums up his experience with chilling honesty:

"We liked to shoot things. We shot birds and parrots and gulls
and things we didn't know the names for. We shot monkeys and gibbons
and deer and pigs and turtles. We shot flying things and crawling
things and swimming and walking things. We shot oxen and water buffalo
in the open paddies and bet how many M-16 rounds it would take to buckle
one to its knees because it was big and stupid. We shot tigers and
elephants. We rarely shot the enemy. We shot Montagnards. We shot
Vietnamese women and children and a goodly number of old men. And if any
of that were not enough, we shot each other. Then we went home and shot
ourselves."

All of this happened over 40 years ago, and many of Matterhorn’s reviewers are quick to note that our modern troops are far removed from most of the horrors chronicled by Marlantes. Soldiers in Iran or Afghanistan are better equipped and fed, they say, and that a modern grunt’s life cannot be manipulated by career-minded officers.I am a bit skeptical about that. Most readers are fully aware that extending from the walls of Troy to Agincourt, Gettysburg and Dunkirk there are cemeteries and battlefield sites that bear mute witness to the fact that soldiers have been dying for a long time - often, in the judgment of history ... without purpose or meaning.

THE RIDERS by Tim Winston - Reviewed by Gary Carden

The Riders by Tim Winton
New York: Scribner
$14.00 (paperback) - 374 pages


The great kite of the crucified Christ loomed and caused the crowd to vibrate. Like a pyre before him, the bank of burning candles waited.The hot pure smell of burning. A woman’s fan of blonde hair in front of him scented like roses as he walked, Billy beside him, her face glowing with hurt and understanding. He lit a candle and held it up before him. God, how his head soared and pitched, how rod-like his blood went into his veins. A candle for the birth of Christ, for the squirming of Job in his own shit, for Jonah, running like a mad bastard from the monster he knew he was.
- The Riders, p. 317

This cunningly crafted novel is likely to pose a unique problem for many reviewers. Winston’s complex and vivid narrative, replete with stunning imagery and pulsing color often distracts to the point that the reader is likely to forget what The Riders is about. In effect, almost every sentence in this novel has the cadence and beauty of poetry.Time and time again, this reviewer found himself reading paragraphs over and over for the pleasure of gliding through Winton’s complex sentences (which often resemble finely crafted necklaces composed of a network of images.

The paragraph which introduces this review is an example of hundreds of paragraphs that have the same amazing lyricism. Essentially, it is a description of the drunken Scully, the novel’s protagonist entering a Catholic church on Christmas Eve with his six-year-old daughter, Billy who has become his caretaker. Even though Billy’s face has been mangled by a crazed dog, she is desperately trying to ignore the pain in order to lead her helpless father through the back streets of Paris. Scully is searching for his wife who has abandoned him and his daughter. As his search becomes increasingly desperate, he begins to identify with Old Testament figures (Job and Jonah) and literary figures like the lurching one-eyed, hunchback, Quasimodo - a figure that his daughter feels her father resembles.

In many ways the plot of The Riders is as complex as the languages that defines it. Scully, a shy and inept Australian laborer, has had the good fortune (or misfortune) to marry the beautiful Jennifer who has “artistic aspirations” and spends much of her time in training to become a painter. Surrounding herself with a cultured (and parasitic) covey of itinerant artists, Jennifer’s obsession drives her through all of the major cities of Europe where studies under other painters. Scully supports his wife and child by earning a living as a carpenter or laborer on fishing boats. Despite the fact that he is treated with contempt by Jennifer and her friends, Scully readily accepts his role, content to be married to Jennifer.

With his wife’s tacit approval, Scully buys an abandoned farm in a remote section of Ireland and renovates it, believing that Jennifer (who is living with her artistic friends) will join him after the work is completed. On the appointed day, Scully arrives at the airport to find Billy, his six-year-old daughter - but no Jennifer. Billy is strangely mute and refuses to discuss her mother’s absence.Thus begins a heartbreaking odyssey. Convinced that his wife has been kidnapped or has undergone a traumatic experience that has made it impossible for her to keep the appointed date in Ireland, Scully decides to return all of the places where they have lived during the past six years: a Greek fishing village, an artist’s colony in Paris and a houseboat port in Amsterdam, etc.

It is a bitter and disillusioning journey. When Scully contacts Jennifer’s former friends, he not only discovers that none of them know where his wife is, but that they generally felt that she was both untalented and unfaithful. As Scully exhausts his savings, he reluctantly begins to consider the possibility that Jeniffer has abandoned him and Billy.

One of the most disturbing passages in The Riders deals with Scully’s encounter with Irma, a woman who befriends the father and child. However, after an attempt to seduce Scully fails, Irma becomes a kind of stalker, pursuing Scully from city to city and taunting him with the hint that she knows where Jennifer is. Although she initially appears to be a benevolent fellow traveler, Irma becomes increasingly destructive with each encounter. After she succeeds in stealing Scully’s “identity” and cancels his credit card, the bewildered father has nothing left ... but an ingenious daughter.

The Riders is a love story that records the death of innocence. Scully’s childlike devotion to Jennifer is gradually corrupted, undermined by the painful revelations of his journey. Perhaps, at the end of story when he returns to his renovated farm, he is “sadder but wiser.”

In addition to the story of Scully’s painful journey, The Riders contains a kind of fable which appears to have no relevance to the novel’s action - yet it may be a metaphor for Scully’s dilemma. Near the abandoned farm in Ireland, Scully finds the ruins of an ancient castle and witnesses a strange nocturnal ceremony. Hundreds of riders appear below the castle and wait, mutely staring up at the castle. There is no revelation. No one appears on the ancient parapets and so the mute riders vanish. They will return as they have done for countless nights. Although Scully witnesses the riders’ ceremony twice (once before his vain search for Jeniffer and once after he abandons the search), he decides not to participate in the future. Perhaps he has learned a painful lesson about the futility of waiting for a return that will never occur.

What does it mean? Why is the fable of the riders a part of Scully’s story? Possibly, the connection is that both Scully’s story and the ceremony before the ancient castle have to do with “unquestioning devotion.” Both the riders and Scully have wasted their lives waiting for something that will never come.

Certainly, The Riders is a unique novel. Winton blends poetic description, Irish ballads, an odyssey through the back streets of Europe and a mysterious fable that reads like a variation of “Waiting for Godot.” Filled with dazzling passages of lyric narrative, The Riders easily demonstrates why Tim Winton is considered one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

One Second After by William R. Forstchen - Reviewed by Gary Carden

One Second After by William R. Forstchen
New York: A Tom Doherty Associates Book
$24.95 - 349 pages

“It is not a matter of “if,” it is a matter of “when.”
- General Eugene Habier USAF (RET.)
Former Commander in Chief
U.S. Strategic Command (May 2002)

Let me begin this review by confessing that I never heard of E.M.P. (Electromagnetic Pulse) and I was distressed to learn that its destructive potential has been readily acknowledged by both the Pentagon and the White House (Newt Gingrich wrote the forward for this novel). According to the author, the public’s ignorance of the threat posed by this silent enemy is largely due to the fact that the first information about the destructive potential of E.M. P. was released on the same day that the final report on the 9/11 catastrophe appeared in the media. In short, the horrors attending the fall of the Twin Towers so totally dominated the news (as well as the imagination of the American public) that readers paid scant attention to a new “theoretical danger.”

Briefly defined, E.M.P. represents a nuclear weapons strategy which would render an entire country helpless by simply destroying that country’s computer technology. In theory, a nuclear missile designed to detonate some twenty miles above the surface of the designated country (in this fictional enactment, it is over Kansas) would simply “erase” all computer-dependent technology. Within one second of the explosion, a shock wave would short-circuit every electrical device that it touched. In-flight planes would crash, all motorized vehicles would stop, and all communications (TV, radio, telephones) would cease. The country’s inhabitants would be unaware of what had happened until they encountered the consequences (stalled cars, dead phones and the silence attending the loss of mass communications).

In order to graphically demonstrate the devastation of such an attack,author Forstchen has created a novel in which the inhabitants of a small town (Black Mountain, N. C.) fight for survival in the aftermath of an E.M.P. attack. The first evidence that something is amiss is the stalled traffic on I-40. As the town ceases to function, the first causalities occur in hospitals where patients are on life support. Early fatalities include individuals with pacemakers and individuals dependent on dialysis. Diabetics and cancer patients are immediately “at risk.” Schools and nursing homes, now without air conditioning, electricity or refrigeration quickly become unsanitary and unsafe. As concerns about food and drinking water increase, looting and theft become commonplace. Within three days, the local stores have been raided and the desperate civic officials have implemented martial law. Money becomes worthless and Black Mountain gradually reverts to a barter system in which bullets, cigarettes and canned goods become mediums of exchange. (Ten .22 bullets for a rabbit, two bullets for a cigarette, etc.)

John Matherson, the protagonist of One Second After, (like author Forstchen) has military experience and teaches at Montreat-Anderson College. Matherson had given up a promising military career when he decided to bring his ailing wife home to Black Mountain. Following the death of his wife, this history instructor and veteran of Desert Storm had become one of the most popular citizens of the small town. When disaster strikes the town calls on him to assist in developing a survival strategy. In a matter of days, he and a few civic leaders are rationing food and water, patrolling the Interstate, collecting fire arms and mobilizing vehicles that function without computer technology (pre-1970’s). One of the town’s most valuable vehicles is a Ford Edsel!

The greatest threat to the town’s inhabitants proves to be the ignorance produced by the information vacuum. Although it is evident that the United States has been attacked, no one knows the identity of the enemy - Iran? North Korea? China? Unanswered questions include: Is the war over? Who won? What is going on in the rest of the world?

In conjunction with the unknown fate of America, Black Mountain and other small towns in the region find themselves coping with great numbers of people arriving from Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Atlanta. Within a matter of weeks, Old Fort, Marion, Morganton and Asheville are reduced to embattled fiefdoms that strive with little success to maintain cooperative relationships with other towns while attempting to deflect migrating hordes and protect their supplies, such as food and water and medication.

A sustained level of tension and suspense in One Second After is produced by Forstchen’s stark portrayal of the town’s speedy descent into brutal savagery. As John Matheson and the civic leaders of Black Mountain struggle to maintain the basic principles that created this country, they are repeatedly forced to acknowledge that civilization’s fragile veneer is being stripped away. Reports begin to arrive concerning murderous armies composed of thousands of armed and desperate individuals that are moving steadily toward western North Carolina. The largest group, called the Posse, are “practicing cannibals” and have left a terrifying wake of rape, murder and ruin behind them. According to rumor, a similar group (a self-styled cult) is approaching from Tennessee.

Before One Second After has run its course, John Matherson finds all of his most cherished principles challenged. Certainly, he had not foreseen the painful decisions he would face as the town’s military advisor. Not only does he condone the killing of “invaders;” he serves as executioner. In time he even assists in converting his beloved college into a military base where his former students serve as the last barrier between the Posse and his town. He watches loved ones die of starvation and implements policies that result in the willful withholding of food and medication for individuals who are fated to die anyway (triage).

There is a daunting message in this novel. One Second After is a cautionary tale. The worst horrors depicted here (and there are many) are simply projections based on countless studies of what could happen to the United States should it suddenly lose all of its complex technical advances in one blinding flash. We are a pampered country, says William R. Forstchen coddled by a great web of technical marvels. Take them away and we are heartbreakingly vulnerable - so vulnerable that 80% of us would perish before we could adapt to a world without technology.