Interview: Karl Marlantes, Author, Vietnam veteran

Published on Sunday 15 August 2010 11:41

Sometimes, when Karl Marlantes hears an unexpected noise, a car horn or perhaps a door slamming, he has to go through a routine. He counts to ten.

He whispers to himself: "You're not in Vietnam". He observes his body trembling with all the coolness of a doctor examining a patient and remembers why this is happening to him. Yes, of course. Forty years ago he was Lieutenant Marlantes, a US marine fighting for his life in the Vietnamese jungle "with a bunch of kids, on both sides". Slowly the silver-haired, highly decorated veteran talks himself down. He's good at it. He's been doing it for decades.

"You know when you go, what's that noise?" he says softly. "You go, hmmm, I wonder if it's a bird. Or maybe the wind. Or might it be the enemy? Well, by that time you're dead. That's why in combat most people die in the first two months. Their brains haven't changed yet to react quickly enough. In extreme stress the brain reorganises so it immediately goes to worst case scenario and that's what saves your life in combat. It's a healthy adaptation. The problem is when you come back."

By the Nineties, more than 20 years after coming back, Marlantes was falling apart. One day, driving down the street, the car behind honked its horn. "Well, I was startled," he says mildly. "Then I was out of the car and on the bonnet trying to kick his windshield in. I looked around, saw I was in the middle of an intersection, my kid in the car. And I was going to kill this guy. I was really embarrassed.

"A more funny story," he goes on, trying to sweeten the pill, "was when I was sleeping in our house and heard a noise in the night. The next thing I was out on the street stark naked, ready to take it on." He laughs. I don't, but find myself smiling weakly for his sake. "It's way better now. I take medicine every day and I've had a lot of therapy. You don't get rid of it but you learn to manage it. Even though I have a terrible startle reaction, I'm conscious of it now. My kids would tell you stories. 'Don't wake dad up.' 'Cough from a good distance to warn him.' It must have been very hard on them."

In the midst of all this trauma, or stress wounds as Marlantes calls them "because the brain gets wounded too", he was trying to write a book about his experiences in Vietnam. Now, at the age of 65, he has published Matterhorn, a tremendous 600-page novel based on what happened when he was there. He has been writing this extraordinary book for more than 30 years and the long gestation has paid off. Sebastian Junger has called Matterhorn "one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam or any war".

It is being referred to as the Great American Vietnam War Novel, up there with Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. It is high in the New York Times bestseller list. Matterhorn is a staggering read in all senses, full of the stupefying boredom, absurdity, confusion, terror, filth, despair, futility and numbness of war.

Marlantes wrote a first draft months after leaving Vietnam, knocking out 1,700 pages of A4 and then realising they were basically therapeutic babble. But by 1977 he had a new version and was punting it to publishers. "I just always had this book," he says. "It was always 'where's dad?' 'In the basement working on the book.' It was part of life. On the one hand it kept me out of the bars and off drugs.

Whenever I was starting that sort of ... urrrrggggghhhh." He makes a tense, angry face. "God, I'm a writer but I can't articulate that feeling," he says, shaking his head, but it isn't true. Anger simmers, boils, and erupts throughout Matterhorn. "Writing the book helped, but on the other hand it stirred it up. When I had to start editing again all the nightmares would come back. I'd be working on a scene and would start to feel the trembling."

Marlantes is trembling now. He is already shaking when we meet at a hotel in London, and sit in the cool, quiet lobby to talk and the tremors don't let up despite his fastidious appearance. He is a square-shouldered, big, wholesome man. He is wearing a meticulously pressed grey pinstripe suit with a floral tie. His silver hair is sharply parted. He has a kind, tired face and hollow eyes. He looks impressive, commanding, just as you would imagine a marine captain to look. But the constant trembling makes him boyish and vulnerable.

I order coffee but Marlantes has nothing. "When I got back to the States I was doing this Pentagon job and I was bored and drinking a lot of coffee," he says. "I went to this navy doctor and said, 'Jeez doc, my hands are shaking'. He asked me how much coffee I drank and I told him 17 or 18 cups a day. He told me I'd better stop, so I did. I was knee-walking, throwing up sick for three days. You be careful. It's addictive stuff." He keeps pressing all his fingers together so the pads flush white. Still, they shake. Now and then his lip wobbles and the muscles in his face twitch.

Lieutenant Marlantes was 19 when he was dropped on the side of a mountain in thick, fog-shrouded jungle near the North Vietnamese border. It was 1968, seven years to go until the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), and US involvement in the war was at its peak. Marlantes was a young US marine from a small logging town in Oregon who had abandoned a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University to sign up. He was a shy, naive boy who volunteered for the marines partly because he felt he owed his country "a couple of years" and partly because his friends on the school football team had gone to a mysterious place called Camp Pendleton, a marine recruiting depot in San Diego, and come back four inches wider. They walked differently.

Had enormous shoulders. "It was about masculinity," Marlantes says. "Well, I wanted some of that." He never expected to find himself fighting in a war.

Matterhorn, the novel's title, is the codename for a remote military base a mile up a mountain. Lieutenant Waino Mellas, an amalgam of Marlantes and his brother, arrives at Matterhorn in 1969 feeling awkward and green, the oddball Yale graduate who must command Bravo Company. Mellas, like Marlantes, is one of very few college boys and some of the marines resent him at first. Racial tensions between black and white marines are rife. Most of their hatred is directed not at the enemy but at their own company commanders who fail to understand the terrain and lack any concrete strategy.

The novel spans three months, during which time the marines are ordered to fortify Matterhorn with bunkers that will withstand an assault from the "the gooks" (the NVA). Then they are ordered to abandon the bunkers and "hump" (march) through the jungle for six days without food. One marine is killed by a tiger, another dies of malaria. "Birds" (choppers) are unable to resupply the marines because of the monsoon clouds lying thick on the mountains. The marines deal with jungle rot, immersion foot, mines, dysentery, dehydration, leeches, and a mostly invisible enemy. A series of grim, pointless battles are relayed by Marlantes in searing, visceral prose.

"The things that happen to Mellas are the things that happened to me," Marlantes explains. "Or to guys I knew. Like the tiger incident. My company had to go find the guy. I wasn't on that particular patrol but I saw him when they brought him in. He was half eaten. Imagine his mother seeing that body come home. Urgh." He shudders. "On Amazon there were people talking about the book and saying this is ridiculous, there are no tigers in Vietnam. Oh boy, you should have seen the veterans coming out to set them straight."

In one battle Mellas takes a risk and runs towards the bunkers where NVA soldiers are tossing grenades down the hill towards his unit. He ends up looking in the face of "a kid" and telling him to stop throwing grenades or he will shoot. The kid throws the grenade and Mellas shoots. This, too, happened to Marlantes. "I looked the guy right in the eye," he says. "I had him and I knew I had him. I remember going through it with him. Don't throw it. I won't shoot. He threw it. I shot. You do change. It's the most intense thing."

In another, Mellas fears he accidentally shot one of his own marines in the head. He will never know either way and it will never stop gnawing at him. "That's very common in combat," he says. "Mistakes get made when there is a whole lot of lead flying around. There was an incident when I didn't know whether something I did killed a guy or not. And I don't know to this day. Gosh, it could have been me. Maybe it wasn't. I'll never know. Friendly fire, they call it."

Sometimes Mellas is sick with terror, sometimes he is beyond horror, just numbly reacting, and sometimes he is thrilled by what he is doing. It was difficult for Marlantes to explore all this in himself. "None of us like to admit we can be that mean," he says, then corrects himself. "It's not mean. It's about being primitive. To admit that there is actually a thrill is hard but I have to if I'm going to be an honest writer. In my own personal case there were times when I killed someone in Vietnam and I felt good about it. And then my civilised self would reflect on it and I'd start weeping. I'd realise I just killed a kid and I would cry. But that more primitive me is in there too. How do you reconcile this horrible thing? That's why civilisation is such a thin veneer."

He looks around at the calm, quiet lobby dotted with a few people talking business over morning coffee. "Look around. People can be nice and ordinary, then suddenly they're killing each other." Does it feel odd to be "back in civilisation" seeing the world the way he does? "Right," he says. "I'm always aware of it."

The point Marlantes makes is that it's war that brutalises, not the people who fight it. "I don't like the word brutalised," he says to me when I use it. "When people say you're brutalised, well, the fact of the matter is you're just as brutal as me but you've been able to keep a lid on it. You haven't had the chance to let the mad monkey out. But if you did, it would."

Women, unsurprisingly, are absent from Matterhorn. But the marines yearn for them, long for sex and femininity and tenderness, but end up reading porn. At one point Mellas wonders why he sometimes hates women. I ask Marlantes about misogyny in war.

"For Mellas it's because he loves women so much. They have power over him. And I think there was a sense of resentment because you would have a bunch of girls protesting and blaming you and calling you brutal … they never had to face it." He adds that when he eventually returned to Oxford after Vietnam a group of English women took him under their wing and cared for him. "They poured tea and femininity with a capital 'F' into me," he says. "That was very healing. Guys need that."

Marlantes left his 13-month tour a decorated captain. His brother picked him up from Travis Air Force Base in California and warned him he would be shocked by the reception outside. "There were all these protesters. I was stunned. They were flipping me the bird and pounding on my brother's car as we drove off."

Did he speak to anyone about what had happened? "No," he says. "There is a silence that's required. If you talk about the bad things you're whining and if you talk about the good things you're bragging. Society has very conveniently worked out how to shut everyone up about this.

Once I told a girl I liked I was in the marines and she stood up, said 'you're the worst' and stormed off. I never saw her again. How many guys now come back from Iraq and Afghanistan and talk about what actually happened? If you tell, people think you're a horrible, brutal person."

But in the end he did tell, in Matterhorn. A few months after Marlantes got home in 1970 he was delivering papers to the White House. Outside there were more anti-war protesters and they started shouting at him. "I felt that except for luck, they could have been me and I could have been them," he says. Then, when he saw the North Vietnamese flags they were waving, he realised that had it been six weeks earlier he would have shot them.

"Suddenly I wanted to explain myself to this bunch of strangers," he says. "I wanted to tell my story, to be understood. Don't we all want that?"

Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, is published by Corvus, priced 16.99. Marlantes is at the Edinburgh Book Festival today, 8pm.

&#149 This article was first published in The Scotsman, Saturday August 14, 2010