Karl Marlantes' Vietnam War novel 'Matterhorn' may not have peaked yet

Seattle Times: Karl Marlantes' Vietnam War novel 'Matterhorn' may not have peaked yet

Last spring this column featured Karl Marlantes, the Woodinville author of "Matterhorn," a novel of the Vietnam War that took three decades to write and get published.

With most stories I get a flurry of reader response, then the public and myself move on to other things. Not this time. For most of 2010, and into 2011, I've been passing on this sort of fan mail to Marlantes' publisher:

To Karl Marlantes:

I am 76 years old, Naval Academy, former Marine aviator. In the vernacular of "Matterhorn," it is a (expletive deleted) good book.

There it is.

I thought of this terse but eloquent testimony last month when Marlantes won what was for him a particularly satisfying literary prize: the Colby Award, which recognizes a debut work of fiction or nonfiction that raises the public's awareness of intelligence operations, military history or international affairs. Previous winners have included Dexter Filkins for "The Forever War," and James Bradley for "Flags of Our Fathers."

At 600 pages, "Matterhorn" (Atlantic Monthly Press/ El León Literary Arts), is the harrowing saga of what befalls a platoon of Marines, mostly teenagers led by a reservist with an Ivy League education, when they embark on a dangerous mission to sever an enemy supply line. Not easy reading.

I called Marlantes, on a swing through the Southeast on a book tour, and asked him why he thought the novel had inspired such devotion among the military, from the prize-awarders to grunts.

"I had no idea it would ring such a chord," Marlantes said.

For those who fought and protested it, Vietnam was like "being in the family with the alcoholic father — we all know that dad drinks, but we never talk about it," he said. The conflict so divided the country, it's taken 30 years for some people to revisit it. For some, the trigger was the experience of reading Marlantes' book.

There was the woman who came up to Marlantes after a signing. She wept. She said her father had been an anti-war protester, his brother a Marine in Vietnam. A third brother, also a Marine, died in the conflict. She gave each of the surviving brothers a copy of the book, and after 30 years, they started talking to one another again.

A man arrived at a signing with five copies of "Matterhorn" in his arms. "How come five books?" Marlantes asked. "He said, 'I was a Marine in Vietnam, and I served very close to the area the book describes. I've been trying to tell my wife and children for 40 years what it was like. I'm going to give them each this book, and that will tell them what it was like.' "

This sort of attention can be discomfiting — people need to talk about their pain. They'll say, "My brother died in Vietnam. Did you know him?" It's hard, he says, "but I can't not answer them."

Marlantes has won other prizes, including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award and the Flaherty-Dunnan award for a first novel. One of his best experiences was at the Miami Book Festival, where he was on a panel with writer Sebastian Junger, author of a close-encounters book about Afghanistan titled "War."

He and Junger discussed the eerie parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan: "The enemy runs across the border, and we can't follow them. We don't understand the language, the culture, the history. We're supporting a corrupt government that the people don't follow. The enemy has no rules of engagement, they can do anything they want. "

The difference: The war in Afghanistan is being fought by an all-volunteer army, which muffles political discussion and engagement.

Marlantes likes to think that those similarities are one reason for the success of "Matterhorn" — baby boomers who lived through Vietnam can see those parallels. Maybe that's part of it. And maybe, as the naval aviator so succinctly put it, it's because it's a (expletive deleted) good book.