First, let me say that when I was a young man of 12 or 13 I read different fictional war novels and liked them a lot. I look back now and I see the appeal they had to me. I grew up on three and a half acres with no kids my own age and so I spent a lot of time pretending in those woods with my BB gun and my internal narrative of what it must have been like to be in the army, to be part of a brotherhood of men who would die for each other. But, as I turned into a full-fledged teen with a dysfunctional family and other typical teen concerns I moved on from war novels into other genres. Until taking a listen the audiobook version of Matterhorn I had not read a war novel in somewhere around 20 years or so.

I’m not really sure how I came across Matterhorn. I was looking for something different than the sci-fi and fantasy and other non-fiction science books I have been reading or listening to as of late. I chose the audiobook form because it was available from my library and I have the ability to listen all day at work (and the ability to multi-task while listening). The novel began slowly with the introduction of the main character, Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, who is fresh to Vietnam in 1969 in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive and his assignment to Bravo Company in the northwest corner of South Vietnam where the Demilitarized Zone and Laos meet.

The novel starts with Bravo Company occupying Firebase Matterhorn which happens to be the largest hill in the area. Small patrols are run every day around the perimeter of the hill and things are pretty quiet for the most part. There isn’t much to see or do and the biggest problem isn’t the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), even though a weapons cache had been recently found in the area, but rather resupply because Matterhorn is often surrounded poor weather conditions making helicopter flights in and out difficult.

Enter Colonel Simpson and Major Blakely; both high-minded go-getters at headquarters who personify what would later become a major problem in the Vietnam War, micro-managers unfamiliar with actual field conditions calling all the shots from the relative safety of their headquarters. Colonel Simpson is convinced that there are NVA around Matterhorn and he is determined to see “his” marines take the battle to them rather than sit around watching the valleys below for movement and calling in artillery strikes.

Once Simpson arrives at Matterhorn to personally oversee operations he quickly puts First Lieutenant Fitch, who is heading the company due to a lack of available captains, in his doghouse. He orders Bravo Company to march to the recently discovered ammo cache and destroy it. They do so and then instead of returning to Matterhorn they are told to march elsewhere as Matterhorn has now been abandoned for other, newer plans. Simpson has told the General overseeing the regiment that his men can handle the march by foot and rendezvous at the new destination and maybe “kill some gooks” along the way.

This march is the first big turning point in the book where Mellas begins to see firsthand the ugliness of war and the total lack of mission that so often accompanied leadership determinations in Vietnam. Due to a logistics mistake during the abandonment of Matterhorn the rations that were supposed to be given Bravo Company were taken back to the Headquarters along with fresh batteries and other medical supplies. To make a long story short, by the time they actually get to the rendezvous point, Bravo Company has gone without food for five or six days, have lost several men to sickness (and a tiger) and have multiple other men down with severe jungle rot. And for what? Well, Lieutenant Fitch never really gets a solid answer to that question. The bitterness begins to sink in.

I do not want to write a super long review but I’ll tell you that eventually Bravo Company is redeployed back to the area around Matterhorn only to find that after abandoning it the NVA decided to dig in. Colonel Simpson is elated because he was always sure the NVA were in the area, but Bravo Company is not so elated because the same Colonel whom they despise and told them to abandon it in the first place orders them to assault first the hill next to it and then Matterhorn itself and retake it. Battle and Blood ensue and eventually it is Mellas who does the math involved in the amount of munitions they are being shelled with and determines the size of the force they are actually fighting with.

I would say the story is well told but it is most definitely not a happy story with a happy ending or a victorious ending or whatever word might be applied. It is not all guts and glory, many people I began to like in the story do not come out alive or whole. I would say that nobody is left unchanged and while the book is fiction, it reads very much more like a non-fiction account of Marlantes’s experiences in Vietnam. In fact, many of the experiences and persons found in the book mirror his non-fiction work titled What It Is Like to Go to War.

And while Mellas is the main character, Marlantes also writes the perspectives of many of the other characters and he addresses the issues that he encountered at the time such as the racial tensions between white and black soldiers. He gives the General’s perspective and his doubts about the war effort as well and even Simpson and Blakely’s perspectives offer much to the reader, who, without them, would probably think the duo bumbling idiots rather than well-intentioned career soldiers who mean well but often make poor decisions. Many company soldiers and even non-company soldiers at Headquarters are given perspectives that give the reader a peek into their hopes, their wishes, and their fears.

By the end of the book I don’t know that I really liked any of the characters and yet I didn’t find I really hated any of them either. I felt very ambivalent about everything to do with the book and its characters and the war they were involved in. But, maybe that is the point Marlantes wanted to make, maybe that is how he felt having served his tour in Vietnam and returning not really sure why he had been there fighting to begin with. By the end of the novel everyone’s views and opinions changed to some extent, even mine.