Matterhorn and the Mad Monkey Within
Martin RocheThe strains of famous anti-war writing echo throughout Karl Marlantes’ novel of the Vietnam War, Matterhorn. In Matterhorn, before going into battle, American officers drunkenly anoint one another with whiskey on their foreheads, saying, in the manner of Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mor-r-i…” Lieutenant Mellas, the main character of Matterhorn, hears a rat rustling through discarded C-rations and “imagined it dragging its wet belly on the ground.” In his “Break of Day in the Trenches,” Isaac Rosenberg of World War I similarly wrote that a “queer, sardonic rat,” unbothered by the human torment, jumped to life near his hand.
The best war fiction tries to reveal what Wilfred Owen called “...the truth untold,/The pity of war, the pity war distilled." War conjures a pity in people that is gradually extinguished by war's seeming inevitability and endurance. Such works are often written by war’s former combatants, yet veterans often find it difficult to express how war reconstructs the human mind. No wonder then that as a former Marine in “The Shit” in the late 1960’s, it took Karl Marlantes 30 years to write Matterhorn.
Marlantes successfully captures the chaos and the madness of basic combat. Yet the novel is also a story of the Marines Corps itself - “the crotch” - and of the seemingly unbreakable brotherhood among its men. His point of view is its protagonist, Lieutenant Mellas, a briefly green officer recently graduated from Princeton and Quantico, who takes a command of troops in Bravo Company near the border with Laos. Mellas notices that many of his fellow Marines arise from circumstances very different from his own. Many originate from broken communities throughout America, from shattered families riddled with alcoholism, poverty, madness and neglect. But they are all in a Marine family now, however dysfunctional it may be. One Marine in the novel refuses to go home because the platoon’s dog Pat will be euthanized if he does; the saying goes that a combat dog cannot feasibly live Stateside as a domesticated pet. Semper fidelis indeed.
Throughout the novel – set in the first half the bloody year of 1969 - what both saves and damns the characters is their willingness to obey the Marine Corps’s credo of semper fi. Because of it, men risk their lives to recover bodies both dead or alive and carry them for miles on end even as they rot. Ordinary grunts who are no more than teenagers are the true heroes of the novel because they simply do what they are told with the hope for better things.
Yet Matterhorn's truest reflections are reserved for Bravo’s officers. Mellas is one of four Lieutenants in Bravo under the command of “Big John Six,” Colonel Simpson, an alcoholic, narcissistic lifer whose ambitions for success are often blurred by the successes and failures of the previous wars in which he has fought. Vietnam is a different kind of war, with unclear objects and points of victory, and from the safety of his tent, Colonel Simpson pushes his men past exhaustion, past madness, malaria, starvation, and delirium in the jungle because he drinks himself into believing that they do not possess the same qualities of the Marines gone before him in Korea and Iwo Jima. Drive them harder, he believes, push their loyalty, and they will learn discipline and gratitude. What makes matters worse is that the supplies that should come by helicopter and support Bravo on their killing errands are often obscured by the monsoon season’s fog. The men are almost always left to their own feeble devices, and when they are not fighting the enemy, they fight jungle rot, immersion foot, pitch darkness, insomnia and leeches without much hope.
What is the justification for these excursions? Altogether, there is no strategic objective. The object is to simply “kill.” Simpson’s adjutant constantly reminds him that the “kill-ratio” of Americans to North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) is the key to getting more support from higher command. Land has no meaning, except to disrupt the flow of supplies to and from Laos, where the enemy successfully retreats time and again (not unlike the way the Taliban find refuge in Pakistan).
For example, the vital height position of the landing hill Matterhorn (so named for the Swiss peak) is abandoned by Simpson when he demands that Bravo move elsewhere in search of the enemy. But then in drunken haze of pride, he changes his mind and forces Bravo back up the mountain to retake what they abandoned because it becomes obvious that the NVA have taken Matterhorn themselves. Simpson's alternating acts of bullying and condescending gratitude to his troops veil both his bottomless insecurity and an over-reliance on Jack Daniels to think things through. He is truly one of the more wretched villains I have read of late.
But the greatest villain is the war, a bottomless pit of despair where the obvious objectives of the North Vietnamese – national freedom and ejection of foreigners – are more convincing to Mellas than the policy of attrition and containment that marked United States Cold War policy. Mellas kills Vietnamese teenagers who are younger than the teenagers under his command. He hates the NVA for threatening his life; they hate him for representing something tangibly historical. As he kills two more NVA in a foxhole, the narrator writes, “His rage was gone, and in its place was sick, inert weariness…the North Vietnamese would never quit. They would continue the war until they were annihilated, and he did not have the will to do what that would require.”
What Marlantes also handles with both dexterity and awkwardness is the profound war within the company - the bigotries that exist between black and white soldiers and the inability of anyone to really do anything about it. Marlantes' ear for the African-American voice of his characters seems forced, which is probably about what most white writers would find as well. The drama is authentic, though. Sergeant Cassidy of Bravo sees black soldiers as “pukes” who are not worthy of being called Marines, and he acts toward them with pernicious cruelty. Meanwhile, steeped in the Black Power rhetoric of the late 60’s, several African-American soldiers in Bravo debate whether or not to “frag” or kill Cassidy. We see the struggle among black soldiers to see who will be the one most committed to the cause of revolution, as they vaguely call it. One even quotes Mao.
But theirs is a battle within a battle to survive. Mellas tries to quell the uprisings he observes among his African-American soldiers, and these efforts add a further sense of how futile indeed it was for our country in that period to ask brave men from poor, divided American communities to keep the South Vietnam free from Communism. Do our newest veterans come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with stories of such racial and ethnic divisions withnin the ranks, or are we truly a better country than we were in 1969? It seems we could not be worse.
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As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlantes’ novel asks us whether warfare is the natural state of the human experience or its perversion. Mellas’ friend Lieutenant Hawke says that people back home have no sense of human nature, that “none of them has ever met the mad monkey inside of us. But we have.” He sounds like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, slowly losing his focus in his narration by discussing the manner in which civilization is a veil for human savagery. “The inner truth is hidden," Marlow says, “--luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"
In Matterhorn, Mellas battles within himself to hold onto a belief in the sense of justice and reason within humanity, and despite all his blunders - some of which have cost his men their lives - his efforts in this line of question are the novel’s most heroic struggles. The night before yet another engagement with the NVA, in the face of his own company’s imploding desire to avenge each other’s violent acts of racism, the narrator discusses Mellas’ state of mind. To Mellas, human destruction is like the useless dynamited holes in the earth that Marlow witnesses in the Heart of Darkness' Congo. As Mellas reflects on the revenge and violence in Vietnam, we hear echoes of Conrad:
“Revenge had no past,” Marlantes writes. “It only started things. It only created more waste, more loss, and he knew that the waste and loss of this night could never be redeemed. There was no filling the holes of death. The emptiness might be filled by other things over the years – new friends, children, new tasks – but the holes would remain.” Matterhorn's greatest success is in a veteran's ability to communicate how war is a human disease whose psychological wounds are personal to the soldier but also cosmic to the cultures it inhabits.
Reader Comments (2)
I just started it, so I will not comment much now and will reserve your assessment for later. The first chapter did not draw me in so much, mainly due to the style reading like a compilation of every cliche Hollywood depiction of Vietnam, especially its dialogue. But I will certainly read on and then return to your review.
Strong review and there is no way I will miss this book. We have had recent conversation on the Afghan war with Cleary and the news has brought us more with new command for the war and the Republicans Steele sticking his foot in his mouth calling it Obama's mistake. It makes no sense to me, war, and how we celebrate it in this country.
I was in Church yesterday and the whole congregation stood and cheered for the altar boy who was enlisting next month. A whole place dedicated to peace and love and forgiveness sending one of their own to a war. And that is where he will head. At least modern warfare gives him a greater chance to come home one day, but the boy, who is probably too young to realize the history of this war, let alone the terrible atrocities to humanity in history, will come face to face with the monkey.
I am terribly divided and confused about the purpose of fighting and whether there is any goodness or nobility in it. As you have said, it may be all be revenge and fear. Protecting our way of life by sending out our most niave seems a disservice to our own young. Your piece is one to ponder or this Independence day as I hope my new one will do. And I will be reading this book for answers..
Thanks fo rthe lunch.