What it is Like to Go to War
Karl Marlantes
What it is Like to Go to War
In 1968, at the age of 22, Karl Marlantes abandoned his Oxford University scholarship to sign up for active service with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. Pitched into a war that had no defined military objective other than kill ratios and body counts, what he experienced over the next thirteen months in the jungles of South East Asia shook him to the core. But what happened when he came home covered with medals was almost worse. It took Karl four decades to come to terms with what had really happened, during the course of which he painstakingly constructed a fictionalized version of his war, "Matterhorn", which has subsequently been hailed as the definitive Vietnam novel. "What It Is Like to Go to War" takes us back to Vietnam, but this time there is no fictional veil. Here are the hard-won truths that underpin "Matterhorn": the author's real-life experiences behind the book's indelible scenes. But it is much more than this. It is part exorcism of Karl's own experiences of combat, part confession, part philosophical primer for the young man about to enter combat. It It is also a devastatingly frank answer to the questions 'What is it like to be a soldier?' What is it like to face death?' and 'What is it like to kill someone?'
4.0 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Society, Politics & Philosophy |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
272 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0857893772 |
| Publisher |
Atlantic |
| |
In 1968, at the age of 22, Karl Marlantes abandoned his Oxford University scholarship to sign up for active service with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. Pitched into a war that had no defined military objective other than kill ratios and body counts, what he experienced over the next thirteen months in the jungles of South East Asia shook him to the core. But what happened when he came home covered with medals was almost worse. It took Karl four decades to come to terms with what had really happened, during the course of which he painstakingly constructed a fictionalized version of his war, "Matterhorn", which has subsequently been hailed as the definitive Vietnam novel. "What It Is Like to Go to War" takes us back to Vietnam, but this time there is no fictional veil. Here are the hard-won truths that underpin "Matterhorn": the author's real-life experiences behind the book's indelible scenes. But it is much more than this. It is part exorcism of Karl's own experiences of combat, part confession, part philosophical primer for the young man about to enter combat. It It is also a devastatingly frank answer to the questions 'What is it like to be a soldier?' What is it like to face death?' and 'What is it like to kill someone?'
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Reviews
The Sunday Times
Max Hastings
"My own lip initially curled in scepticism amid the author’s profuse references to Homer and Sophocles, Jung and Freud, sorties into psychobabble. But as I turned the pages, my reservations faded, and my respect for the author grew. Here is an elderly man who was unquestionably a very brave and successful warrior, analysing exactly what happened to him with high intelligence and notable literary skill ... Every modern British officer should read this book, and consider what they can learn from it."
01/01/2012
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The Washington Post
Marc Leepson
"Brilliant … well crafted and forcefully argued … The most powerful sections of the book are those in which Marlantes offers his first-person observations of what he saw in Vietnam."
01/09/2011
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The Financial Times
Carl Wilkinson
"Brutally honest, clear-eyed and necessary ... Interweaving his personal combat experiences with lessons drawn from Homer, the Mahabharata and Jung, Marlantes, a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar, has written a powerful book that should be required reading for those going to war — and the leaders who send them."
13/01/2012
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The Times
Anthony Lloyd
"At his best, and he is often at his best, Marlantes succeeds in that greatest of writers’ skills, allowing the reader to realise what he or she unconsciously knew but could never articulate. At times, however, his remedies for bridging the gap between spiritual needs and the requirements of killing (introducing combat troops to the concept of Jung’s “shadow aspect” and twinning promotion with instruction on the inner self) appear too Utopian to survive the realities of youth and killing."
07/01/2012
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The New Yorker
Briefly Noted
"[Its] intentions are three fold: to help soldiers-to-be understand what they're in for; to help veterans come to terms with what they've seen and done; and to help policymakers know what they're asking of the men they send into combat. Civilians' assumptions will be challenged by the book's defense of the healthy uses of aggression, its fresh perspective on how atrocities unfold, and its insistence on the spiritual dimension of the battlefield."
10/10/2011
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The New York Times
Elizabeth D Samet
"Gender is vital to Marlantes’s understanding of the warrior’s place in society. His ideas, which owe something to Jungian archetypes, are idiosyncratic, while his meditations on the supposed imperilment of conventional masculinity — part of what he sees as a general decline of social rituals that ostensibly once eased the warrior’s repatriation — evoke at times the stridency of Harvey Mansfield’s “Manliness” and more often the nostalgic mysticism of Robert Bly ... the book’s prevailing emotionalism...too often stands in the way of sustained social critique"
16/09/2011
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