So I just listened to this book on Audible on recommendation from a buddy of mine. I’m glad I did. What a wonderful, tragic work of historical fiction. The book is a first for author Karl Marlantes, a decorated Vietnam War Marine officer. Clink the link or read the summary and excerpt below. The book in written or audiobook form is well worth the time.

Matterhorn

'Matterhorn': A Beautiful, Brutal Vietnam War Epic

Matterhorn
MATTERHORN: A NOVEL OF THE VIETNAM WAR
BY KARL MARLANTES


Read An Excerpt
Thirty-five years have passed since the fall of Saigon, but the Vietnam War has never really loosened its grip on the American imagination. Even people born years after the war have the painful images burned into their minds — Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the little girl running down the street after being burned in a napalm attack; South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a handcuffed Viet Cong soldier in full sight of a television camera. There's no such thing as a kind or gentle war, but the sheer brutality and hopelessness of Vietnam set the tone for American conversations about war and foreign policy for decades after.

We've all seen, at some point, the Vietnam War dramatized on television or acted out in film. But it's impossible, of course, for anyone who wasn't there to fully gauge the horror and violence that American and Vietnamese soldiers encountered every minute of every day. In his debut novel, Matterhorn, Vietnam combat veteran Karl Marlantes attempts to transport his readers to 1969, in a jungle near Laos, just south of the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone — DMZ — where a company of young U.S. Marines are fighting for their lives in a war none of them really understands. And while no one who didn't serve in Vietnam can really grasp what life in that time, that place, was like, Marlantes comes closer than any American writer ever has to capturing the unrelenting terror and enormity of one of the saddest chapters in recent world history.

The protagonist of Matterhorn is 2nd Lt. Waino Mellas, a Marine reservist and Ivy League student called to lead a platoon in Bravo Company. Mellas has ambitions of being a lawyer, maybe a politician, and starts his tour frightened, but still hopeful. After a few weeks in country, he starts to realize he's unprepared, still a kid, leading a platoon of even younger kids — scared, confused, most desperate to go home. His education hasn't prepared him for a series of no-win situations — in the midst of one patrol, Mellas realizes "no strategy was perfect. All choices were bad in some way."


Matterhorn is Marlantes' first book. The author served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded two Purple Hearts and several other commendations.
Courtesy of the author
He and his fellow soldiers are ordered to build a base on a desolate hill, ordered to abandon it, ordered to take it back from the North Vietnamese. The Marines begin to harbor serious doubts about their commanders, and one another — as racial strife threatens to tear apart the entire battalion, Mellas quickly discovers there's no good solution to anything, and all he can try to do is survive. In one heart-wrenching passage, Mellas considers running away, abandoning his friends, but decides against it: "Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live."

There's never been a Vietnam War novel as stark, powerful and brutal as Matterhorn — Marlantes manages to exceed the efforts of his closest literary antecedents, Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried) and James Webb (the brilliant, underrated Fields of Fire). He manages to write with a dark and chilling beauty, even as he chronicles some of the most unspeakable events his readers are likely to encounter. It's the rare kind of masterpiece that enriches not just American literature but American history as well. Marlantes earned a host of medals in Vietnam; the service he's done with this brave novel should earn him, again, the thanks of a nation still broken, still trying to heal from the wounds of Vietnam.

Excerpt: 'Matterhorn'

LANGUAGE ADVISORY: This excerpt contains language that some might find offensive.

Mellas stood beneath the gray monsoon clouds on the narrow strip of cleared ground between the edge of the jungle and the relative safety of the perimeter wire. He tried to focus on counting the other thirteen Marines of the patrol as they emerged single file from the jungle, but exhaustion made focusing difficult. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to shut out the smell of the shit, which sloshed in the water that half-filled the open latrine pits above him on the other side of the wire. Rain dropped from the lip of his helmet, fell past his eyes, and spattered onto the satiny olive cloth that held the armor plating of his cumbersome new flak jacket. The dark green T-shirt and boxer shorts that his mother had dyed for him just three weeks ago clung to his skin, heavy and clammy beneath his camouflage utility jacket and trousers. He knew there would be leeches clinging to his legs, arms, back, and chest beneath his wet clothes, even though he couldn't feel them now. It was the way with leeches, he mused. They were so small and thin before they started sucking your blood that you rarely felt them unless they fell on you from a tree, and you never felt them piercing your skin. There was some sort of natural anesthetic in their saliva. You would discover them later, swollen with blood, sticking out from your skin like little pregnant bellies.

When the last Marine entered the maze of switchbacks and crude gates in the barbed wire, Mellas nodded to Fisher, the squad leader, one of three who reported to him. "Eleven plus us three," he said. Fisher nodded back, put his thumb up in agreement, and entered the wire. Mellas followed him, trailed by his radio operator, Hamilton. The patrol emerged from the wire, and the young Marines climbed slowly up the slope of the new fire support base, FSB Matterhorn, bent over with fatigue, picking their way around shattered stumps and dead trees that gave no shelter. The verdant underbrush had been hacked down with K-bar knives to clear fields of fire for the defensive lines, and the jungle floor, once veined with rivulets of water, was now only sucking clay.

The thin, wet straps of Mellas's two cotton ammunition bandoleers dug into the back of his neck, each with the weight of twenty fully loaded M-16 magazines. These straps had rubbed him raw. All he wanted to do now was get back to his hooch and take them off, along with his soaking boots and socks. He also wanted to go unconscious. That, however, wasn't possible. He knew he would finally have to deal with the nagging problem that Bass, his platoon sergeant, had laid on him that morning and that he had avoided by using the excuse of leaving on patrol. A black kid -- he couldn't remember the name; a machine gunner in Third Squad -- was upset with the company gunnery sergeant, whose name he couldn't remember either. There were forty new names and faces in Mellas's platoon alone, and almost 200 in the company, and black or white they all looked the same. It overwhelmed him. From the skipper right on down, they all wore the same filthy tattered camouflage, with no rank insignia, no way of distinguishing them. All of them were too thin, too young, and too exhausted. They all talked the same, too, saying fuck, or some adjective, noun, or adverb with fuck in it, every four words. Most of the intervening three words of their conversations dealt with unhappiness about food, mail, time in the bush, and girls they had left behind in high school. Mellas swore he'd succumb to none of it.

I read it. Pretty bleak. Hope Marlantes’ Vietnam experience was better.

Parts of Matterhorn are autobiographical. Another of his books: What It Is Like To Go War is a very good read. He is a very interesting man.