Book description
In 1968, at the age of 22, Karl Marlantes abandoned his Oxford
University scholarship to sign up for active service with the US
Marine Corps in Vietnam. Pitched into a war that had no defined
military objective other than kill ratios and body counts, what he
experienced over the next thirteen months in the jungles of South East
Asia shook him to the core. But what happened when he came home
covered with medals was almost worse. It took Karl four decades to
come to terms with what had really happened, during the course of
which he painstakingly constructed a fictionalized version of his war,
MATTERHORN, which has subsequently been hailed as the definitive
Vietnam novel. WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR takes us back to Vietnam,
but this time there is no fictional veil. Here are the hard-won truths
that underpin MATTERHORN: the author's real-life experiences behind
the book's indelible scenes. But it is much more than this. It is part
exorcism of Karl's own experiences of combat, part confession, part
philosophical primer for the young man about to enter combat. It It is
also a devastatingly frank answer to the questions 'What is it like to
be a soldier?' What is it like to face death?' and 'What is it like to
kill someone?'
A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Karl
Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy
Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two
Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. Matterhorn, his novel about the
Vietnam War, took over three decades to complete and was an
international bestseller. He and his wife Anne live on a small lake in
western Washington state.
