Most of us will only know the amplified reality of combat from the comfort of our reading chairs. We've read two recent books on the subject that are remarkably effective at conveying that experience. Most recently it was Sebastian Junger's War, a bare-bones, unfiltered look at a company of soldiers stationed in one of the most dangerous and remote regions of Afghanistan. Junger writes:
"...war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn't where you might die — though that does happen — it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time."
The second new war book we read is Mattherhorn, a national bestseller which is already being hailed as the definitive novel of the Vietnam War. We were fortunate to spend some time last Thursday with the author, Karl Marlantes, who dropped by Turnrow for a midday book signing. With our renewed interest in the thrill of combat, we shamelessly grilled him about his wartime experiences.
A Rhodes Scholar and Yale graduate in addition to being a highly decorated Marine, Karl is extremely well read and knowledgeable when it comes to book talk. Of course, he'd already read Junger's account and echoed the journalist's depiction of combat as a state of heightened awareness. It literally changes the brain, Karl said. Living under threat of sudden chaos and violence interrupts the normal flow of chemicals and responses in the brain. It speeds up reaction time. The old fight-or-flight instincts, softened by civilized living, kick into overdrive. Soldiers are at their greatest risk of death, he said, in their first few months of duty because their brains are sharpening, devolving back to primal impulses.
In War, Junger cites a 1966 study on a Special Forces team in South Vietnam in which soldiers' blood and urine samples were tested to determine the ebb and flow of cortisol. The study found that the soldiers' stress levels were lower under threat of an attack than when the threat had passed. "The only explanations the researches could comes up with," writes Junger, "was that the soldiers had such strong psychological defenses that the attack created a sense of 'euphoric expectancy' among them. 'The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence.'"
As civilians, our only means to these experiences, aside from putting on a flak jacket and tagging along à la Junger, is through literature. (To Karl's mind, no film has accurately captured the combat experience of Vietnam because, by its very nature, its first loyalty is to dramatic convention.) It's easy to dismiss war as pointless human folly, but we owe it to the people who represent us in battle to hear their stories and to attempt to identify with their plight, whether or not we accept the rationale of their mission.
Karl's' book is destined to earn its place among the very best of this literature. He worked painstakingly for decades to tell a story that is both intensely accurate and compelling. The long, harrowing journey of this novel is fashioned after a tour of duty — "It's not a book so much as a deployment," Junger writes about the book in a positive New York Times review — dropping the reader blindly into the war alongside the main character, Lt. Mellas, who is assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company. The young lieutenant must fake his way along, learning, as we do, the names, ranks, personalities and prejudices of his fellow soldiers and superiors, along with the myriad dangers awaiting him in the bush, including the heavily dug-in enemy. The action is centered around the loss and retaking of their remote hilltop outpost, Matterhorn, and in the course of the novel's riveting 600 pages we experience the spectrum of jungle combat — a full sensory, emotional, intellectual and historical immersion.
The story of Matterhorn's creation has become a story in itself. Karl spent the past thirty-odd years working on the book, encountering rejection time and again from publishers too terrified to even read the 1,600 manuscript pages. He honed it and eventually found a champion in El León Literary Arts, a small Berkeley non-profit publisher, and it was ultimately picked up and distributed to its current wide audience by Grove/Atlantic.
It's tempting to picture the veteran slogging daily through his pages, everyday for thirty years in the basement, but Karl has lived an interesting life. Disenchanted with American's reception of vets' homecoming, the Oregon native and father of five took his family overseas for a number of years, serving as an energy consultant in such countries as England, Russia and India, and later he ran a company in Singapore. His struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder ultimately led him home. Nearly every soldier who returns from war must face this affliction. ("The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated ... that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years," writes Junger.) Working on Matterhorn helped Karl sort out his experiences, and he credits it with keeping him away from drugs and alcohol.
Judging the gender make-up of the group who assembled at Turnrow to meet him and get signed books — over two-thirds female — Karl has won over a surprising demographic with his war novel. In fact he credits women for helping his novel succeed every step of the way, from his wife's encouragement to the editors and publishers who moved it along to the next stage, to the many women who have supported it as buyers and readers. While it is gritty and violent and rife with salty language, it may have found appeal among women due to the universality of the storylines woven through the novel, many of which are adapted from mythology. Among his other influences, Karl acknowledges Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and the lesser-known In Parenthesis by David Jones, as well as the World War I era poetry of Wilfred Owen.
He's currently writing his next novel, using the Norse sagas as a guide, set amid the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives. (We anticipate this to be a major new addition to the canon of timber lit.) He expects to work only two or three years on it rather than have us wait another thirty.
In the end, meeting Karl and reading both of these exceptional works, it became clear that books borne out of war, whether from honest and intrepid reporters or soldiers who can step back and objectively reveal the complexities, are the only way we can really know what goes on "over there," the only basis for our judgment and response.
In War, Junger rarely turns away from hard reporting, but on a few welcome occasions he lends his introspection to what he has witnessed. He writes, "Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders."
