I recently completed what I will predict is my book of the year for 2010. It is a novel, and one of the best stories that I have read in a long time. Here is an excerpt:
<span style="font-style: italic">Twenty minutes later Mellas received word to put the Bald Eagle on alert. It was another reconnaissance team, call sign Sweet Alice. They were fighting a running battle with a company-sized unit just south of Matterhorn. Sweet Alice had six Marines.
Mellas radioed the news to the work party over at Task Force Oscar. Something deep within him stirred as he watched the Marines run down the hill from where they had been filling sandbags. Entrenching tools and shirts in their hands, they streamed across the damp airstrip, running for their gear, running possibly to their deaths.
“Semper Fi brothers,” Mellas whispered to himself, understanding for the first time what the word “always” required if you meant what you said.</span>
The book is titled “Matterhorn,” by Karl Marlantes. I knew within 25 pages that he had everything right, from the feeling of being a new rifle platoon commander to capitalizing the word Marine, but as I went deeper into the book and thus into the story, I knew in my gut that he had been there. And so, at 0230, I got out of my reading chair and went to the computer to see who this guy was. U.S. Marine. Lieutenant. U.S. Marine Rifle Company XO. Rhodes Scholar. 30 years to complete this book…
Now, I have never been to the country of Vietnam, and the time that this story takes place would have seen me in the 1st grade, but I have served in a few Marine infantry battalions in a multitude of billets, and in my mind this book ranks up there with the great war novels. For my collection of that period, it quickly moved to No. 1. (As an aside, the book was passed to me by a fairly senior officer that remarked that he didn’t really care for it all that much, so I knew right from the start that I probably would.)
Set in Quang Tri Province, RVN, 2dLt Mellas arrives to Bravo Company, of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment and is assigned as the 1st Platoon Commander. Over a three month period, the reader follows Lt Mellas and experiences what the young men that fought that war experienced, from race issues and Agent Orange to careerists and leeches…melodrama, melancholy, masturbation and morons…
I was so absorbed that I could not put the book down, and those of you that have also served and chose as your profession the carry of the rifle and the pack, you will see a lot of familiar faces. I had the honor of meeting the author today and having him sign my book. Truly, he was a great guy. I was only able to talk to him for a little while, but I asked about some of the characters I liked, and sure enough he was able to tell me about his Marines, many characterized in his novel. One of the characters in the book that I liked the most, sadly I must admit, became real to me at the very same time I was reading the book, via an email from Afghanistan in which a friend told me that one of his best men had died. I’ll admit that I sat there and cried. More to follow…
This is a very good book. Although a novel, I believe it to be very much more…
Semper Fi, Karl Marlantes.
<span style="font-style: italic">Twenty minutes later Mellas received word to put the Bald Eagle on alert. It was another reconnaissance team, call sign Sweet Alice. They were fighting a running battle with a company-sized unit just south of Matterhorn. Sweet Alice had six Marines.
Mellas radioed the news to the work party over at Task Force Oscar. Something deep within him stirred as he watched the Marines run down the hill from where they had been filling sandbags. Entrenching tools and shirts in their hands, they streamed across the damp airstrip, running for their gear, running possibly to their deaths.
“Semper Fi brothers,” Mellas whispered to himself, understanding for the first time what the word “always” required if you meant what you said.</span>
The book is titled “Matterhorn,” by Karl Marlantes. I knew within 25 pages that he had everything right, from the feeling of being a new rifle platoon commander to capitalizing the word Marine, but as I went deeper into the book and thus into the story, I knew in my gut that he had been there. And so, at 0230, I got out of my reading chair and went to the computer to see who this guy was. U.S. Marine. Lieutenant. U.S. Marine Rifle Company XO. Rhodes Scholar. 30 years to complete this book…
Now, I have never been to the country of Vietnam, and the time that this story takes place would have seen me in the 1st grade, but I have served in a few Marine infantry battalions in a multitude of billets, and in my mind this book ranks up there with the great war novels. For my collection of that period, it quickly moved to No. 1. (As an aside, the book was passed to me by a fairly senior officer that remarked that he didn’t really care for it all that much, so I knew right from the start that I probably would.)
Set in Quang Tri Province, RVN, 2dLt Mellas arrives to Bravo Company, of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment and is assigned as the 1st Platoon Commander. Over a three month period, the reader follows Lt Mellas and experiences what the young men that fought that war experienced, from race issues and Agent Orange to careerists and leeches…melodrama, melancholy, masturbation and morons…
I was so absorbed that I could not put the book down, and those of you that have also served and chose as your profession the carry of the rifle and the pack, you will see a lot of familiar faces. I had the honor of meeting the author today and having him sign my book. Truly, he was a great guy. I was only able to talk to him for a little while, but I asked about some of the characters I liked, and sure enough he was able to tell me about his Marines, many characterized in his novel. One of the characters in the book that I liked the most, sadly I must admit, became real to me at the very same time I was reading the book, via an email from Afghanistan in which a friend told me that one of his best men had died. I’ll admit that I sat there and cried. More to follow…
This is a very good book. Although a novel, I believe it to be very much more…
Semper Fi, Karl Marlantes.
