a book
Matterhorn
and What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes · 2009 · 600 pages
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world--both its horrors and its thrills--and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world--both its horrors and its thrills--and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
recommended by 4 people
sourced from public statements

Ryan Holiday
“Karl Marlantes wrote a beautiful sort of haunting novel about his experiences in Vietnam and there's a phrase in that book it appears something like 40 times and the phrase is "there it is" and I think that's kind of a beautiful expression”

Chris Pine
“[Flights] reminded me, oddly, of this book, Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes. He wrote a nonfiction book called What It Is Like to Go to War, which will blow your fucking mind. But Matterhorn is a seven-hundred-page novel about Vietnam, and the drudgery and the impersonalization of war. Essentially, it’s about how we live alone, and we die alone.”↗

Jeremy Clarkson
“If Matterhorn is not the best book ever written, what is?”↗

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