In the summer of 1970, Karl Marlantes, a recently demobilised Vietnam veteran posted to the United States Marine Corps headquarters after 13 months of active service, found himself walking some sensitive military papers across to the Capitol. He was challenged by a group of young anti-war protesters "hollering obscenities", chanting "babykiller" and waving North Vietnamese flags.
"I was stunned and hurt," he recalls. "I thought, you have no idea who I am, I wanted to shoot them. Six weeks before, I was killing North Vietnamese guerrillas in combat." As his immediate rage moderated into puzzled anguish, he found himself wanting "to explain myself to those children. I just wanted to tell my story".
So he began to work on his Vietnam novel, Matterhorn. The national trauma of the war was dragging on and he intended to address something huge in the life of contemporary America. "The Vietnam War was a defining experience in the US," he says. "[It] conditioned our response to things such as Iraq and Afghanistan."
By 1977, Marlantes had completed a massive, first-person narrative, full, he says, of "psychobabble" and a bitterness that he is now embarrassed to contemplate. No publisher would touch it. So he went back to a second draft and a third.
The title is derived from the codename for a remote, mountainous military outpost, a "firebase", near the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam and the Laos border. Matterhorn becomes a killing field for the young marines of Bravo Company, as they repeatedly try to secure a patch of Vietcong ground. They are led by a young second lieutenant named Waino Mellas, who has much in common with Marlantes: an Ivy League graduate from rural Oregon who adheres to the values of his childhood rather than the smart, East Coast radicalism of his Princeton room-mates. Mellas volunteers for the Marine Corps and takes command of a platoon in the northwest corner of South Vietnam during the rainy season of 1969, just as Marlantes did.
While Marlantes was translating his tour of duty into fiction throughout the 1970s and 1980s, supporting himself by working as an energy consultant, the US was coming to terms, creatively, with its national nightmare. Writers were beginning to find their voices. Ron Kovic wrote Born on the Fourth of July during one hectic month in the mid-1970s. Shortly after Michael Herr's Dispatches, Philip Caputo published A Rumor of War, another non-fiction account.
In fiction, meanwhile, the platoon was beginning to emerge as the definitive unit of humanity in the face of battle. The leading exponent of platoon fiction was Tim O'Brien, first in Going After Cacciato (1978) and then in The Things They Carried (1998), a sequence of linked stories based on O'Brien's experiences. In Good Form, the narrator introduces a new element into writing about Vietnam, drawing a distinction between "story truth" and "happening truth", an allusion to Daniel Defoe's famous description of the novel as "lying like truth".
As the US continued to make peace with its past, Marlantes continued to write and rewrite his manuscript. After Iraq, so alienated from war had the public become that some publishers to whom he showed his work advised him to cut it in half and relocate it in Afghanistan. But he refused to deviate from his course.
Many books and films about Vietnam have been unable to suppress a persistent strain of fear and loathing for the place. For Marlantes, the impulse was to celebrate a noble sacrifice and to make his novel an act of homage to the fallen. There is nothing derogatory about Matterhorn. With the passage of time, too, he had found a way to deal with the unmentionable face of conflict — the inevitable racism of the frontline where whites were fighting alongside black troops. "You cannot imagine how racist the army was in the 1960s," he says. "Out in the field, we were held together by fear but once the troops were back at base the old divisions, black and white, would come back."
Truthful and painful or not, still nobody was interested in the story he was telling. "There would be times," he says, recalling his long march to publication, "when I'd say to myself, ‘If you don't believe you've got the talent to do something better than everyone else, you'd have to be crazy to go on.'" The process of composition was accompanied by the nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder. Remarkably, after more than 30 years, the novel exudes a desperate fury as Marlantes drags the reader (and Bravo Company) through firefight after firefight.
The typescript was a beast, some 1,600 pages. No one wanted it. Vietnam was passé; first novels were a no-no; the author was too old; and so on. Spurned by agents and battered by rejection, Marlantes placed his book with a small non-profit publisher in Berkeley, California — El Len Literary Arts.
His luck began to turn. Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, decided Matterhorn was "the Vietnam novel of our generation" and persuaded El Len to go into a commercial partnership. Marlantes has been rewarded for his determination to tell his story: Matterhorn is a bestseller. The commercial tide is turning towards Vietnam stories again. The conflict has begun to join the US Civil War as a national trauma that is finally sponsoring art in new and unexpected ways.
