Review by New York Times Review
A SOLDIER comes home from war. His wife's welcome is extravagant, fit for a god. Refusing to let his feet touch the ground, she unrolls a new carpet, plush and crimson. She tells him he is "like the sun" bringing "warmth in winter," and predicts that he will again be "master . . . of his house, fulfilled." Then the man takes a bath, an act of literal and symbolic cleansing after a long journey and an even longer, deeply compromising war. And there he dies, stabbed by his wife, in bath water polluted by his own blood. This, of course, is the story of Agamemnon, murdered by Clytemnestra on his return from the Trojan War. It is one of antiquity's essential parables of betrayal, a warrior's fantasy turned nightmare, dramatized by Aeschylus (here in Robert Fagles's translation) and found much earlier in Homer's "Odyssey," where it serves as a warning to Odysseus: Don't go home. If you must, wear a disguise and trust no one. Veterans can feel themselves double-crossed in so many different ways - as much by their own wartime experience as by a nation's failure to reincorporate them - that their betrayal proves an almost inexhaustible subject. It textures Karl Marlantes's war novel "Matterhorn," published last year, and provides the mournful keynote to his new nonfiction book, "What It Is Like to Go to War." For Marlantes it isn't a bath but the lack of one that becomes the symbol of betrayal. Just returned from Vietnam, the Marine lieutenant goes home with Maree Ann, a former girlfriend who meets him at the airport. Marlantes initially thinks he needs sex, but the worry that he still has a venereal disease contracted from an Okinawa prostitute, together with a more general feeling of contamination and estrangement, makes him change his mind. In retrospect, he declares, what he really needed was a bath - he needed "Maree Ann to sit down with me in a tub of water and run her hands over my body and squeeze out the wrong feelings and confusion, soothe the pain, inside and out. ... I needed her to dry the tears, and laugh with me, and cry with me. . . . I needed a woman to get me back on the earth, get me down in the water, get me down under the water, get my body to feel again, . . . to come again into her world, the world that I'd left, and which sometimes I think I've never returned to." That's a lot of need, and with every page it becomes increasingly clear that no one can ever wholly satisfy it. The anguish, nervous energy and unfulfilled hunger to be healed in this passage are representative. So, too, is the folkloric vision of women as midwives to the warrior's rebirth, incongruously offered to readers who live in a world where a returning warrior might well be a woman herself. Gender is vital to Marlantes's understanding of the warrior's place in society. His ideas, which owe something to Jungian archetypes, are idiosyncratic, while his meditations on the supposed imperilment of conventional masculinity - part of what he sees as a general decline of social rituals that ostensibly once eased the warrior's repatriation - evoke at times the stridency of Harvey Mansfield's "Manliness" and more often the nostalgic mysticism of Robert Bly. Working to illuminate the spirituality of war, "the temple of Mars," Marlantes devotes individual chapters to a constellation of related ideas including killing, guilt, lying, loyalty, heroism and homecoming. Along the way he cites an eclectic library of consolation: Homer, the "Mahabharata," Native American rituals, medieval sagas. He also includes illustrative vignettes that will be familiar to readers of "Matterhorn," the signal difference being that instead of happening to the fictional Lieutenant Mellas they now befall the actual Lieutenant Marlantes. The story most important to understanding the psychological pain animating both books is the one in which Marlantes is left to wonder whether he accidentally killed a Marine he attempted to rescue in his hunt for a medal. Nowhere does Marlantes explain the significance of fictionalizing an autobiographical event, then returning it to the world of nonfiction. "This book is my song," the author declares toward its close, the culmination of a tormented, 40-year struggle to come home and to find forgiveness. In a revealing moment, Marlantes recounts a meeting with the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who assumes the role of father confessor: "Did you intend right?" Campbell asked, and when Marlantes nodded, he "dismissed my problem with a wave of his hand. Absolution." Absolution is an intensely private matter. No reader can judge its success. The entire book, which Marlantes explains he wrote "primarily to come to terms with my own experience of combat," resides at the same deeply personal level. Yet he also acknowledges a set of laudable, impassioned public ambitions: to help other struggling veterans; to enlighten "citizens and policy makers" about the consequences of waging war; to provide "young people" who might join the military "a psychological and spiritual combat prophylactic, for indeed combat is like unsafe sex in that it's a major thrill with possible horrible consequences." The analogy isn't subtle - it isn't meant to be - and its facility and sensationalism are symptomatic of the book's prevailing emotionalism, which too often stands in the way of sustained social critique and of the patient moral and political analysis required to unravel the convoluted network of courage, shame, honor, obligation and betrayal that war entails. Elizabeth D. Samet is the author af "Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A Rhodes scholar who served as a marine lieutenant in Vietnam (he left Oxford to return to active duty), Marlantes seems to exemplify what we want in our military officers. Thoughtful and articulate, he is a student of history and philosophy; he recognizes the need for armies but believes nations should undertake more soul-searching before going to war. Above all, he feels that we need to do a better job preparing soldiers (he prefers the au courant warriors ) for war and also helping them heal, physically and mentally, from war. He interleaves harrowing scenes from his own experiences in combat with the lessons he learned and his hopes for their broader application. While his often Jungian perspective may strike some readers as idiosyncratic or hard to implement, his empathy is apparent, his emotions are affecting, and his goals are admirable. Both a training manual for would-be warriors and a caution to the politicians who would deploy them, this is also essential reading for civilians who seek to better understand the complicated costs of military action. By turns horrifying and soothing, visceral and deeply profound, it's a book you'll never forget whether you agree with it or not.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Marlantes, author of the highly acclaimed novel Matterhorn, reflects in this wrenchingly honest memoir on his time in Vietnam: what it means to go into the combat zone and kill and, most importantly, what it means to truly come home. After graduating from Yale, Marlantes attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. But not wanting to hide behind privilege while others fought in his place, he left Oxford in 1967 to ship out to Vietnam as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He eschews straight chronology for a blend of in-country reporting and the paradoxical sense of both fear and exhilaration a soldier feels during war. Most importantly, Marlantes underscores the need for returning veterans to be counseled properly; an 18-year-old cannot "kill someone and contain it in a healthy way." Digging as deeply into his own life as he does into the larger sociological and moral issues, Marlantes presents a riveting, powerfully written account of how, after being taught to kill, he learned to deal with the aftermath. Citing a Navajo tale of two warriors who returned home to find their people feared them until they learned to sing about their experience, Marlantes learns the lesson, concluding, "This book is my song," (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Yale- and Oxford-educated Marlantes (Matter-horn) served as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam and here presents his very personal and emotional musings on the nature of war, courage, and all the multiple and often contradictory emotions one endures in combat. His point is that while we prepare our warriors in the technical and tactical aspects of war, we do not prepare them for the emotional toll that it will exact from those who survive. Bronson Pinchot reads with a relatively soft and understated baritone that is actually quite engaging. He becomes, in this performance, Marlantes-recalling incidents of combat and the horror and exhilaration that one withstands. Public, academic, and military libraries should purchase. ["Humanizing, empathetic, and wise, this reading experience will light corners in the human experience often judged dark," read the review, also starred, of the New York Times best-selling Atlantic Monthly hc, LJ 9/15/11.-Ed.]-Michael T. Fein, Central Virginia Community Coll. Lib., Lynchburg (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A manual for soldiers or anyone interested in what can happen to mind, body and spirit in the extreme circumstances of war.Decorated Vietnam veteran Marlantes is also the author of a bestselling novel (Matterhorn, 2010), a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar. His latest book reflects both his erudition and his battle-hardness, taking readers from the Temple of Mars and Joseph Campbell's hero's journey into the hell of combat and its grisly aftermath. That Marlantes has undertaken such a project implies his acceptance of war as a permanent fact of human life. We go to war, he says, "reluctantly and sadly" to eliminate an evil, just as one must kill a mad dog, "because it is a loathsome task that a conscious person sometimes has to do." He believes volunteers rather than conscripts make the best soldiers, and he accepts that the young, who thrill at adventure and thrive on adrenaline, should be war's heavy lifters. But apologizing for war is certainly not one of the strengths, or even aims, of the book. Rather, Marlantes seeks to prepare warriors for the psychic wounds they may endure in the name of causes they may not fully comprehend. In doing that, he also seeks to explain to nonsoldiers (particularly policymakers who would send soldiers to war) the violence that war enacts on the whole being. Marlantes believes our modern states fail where "primitive" societies succeeded in preparing warriors for battle and healing their psychic wounds when they return. He proposes the development of rituals to practice during wartime, to solemnly pay tribute to the terrible costs of war as they are exacted, rather than expecting our soldiers to deal with them privately when they leave the service. He believes these rituals, in absolving warriors of the guilt they will and probably should feel for being expected to violate all of the sacred rules of civilization, could help slow the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war's awesome consequences for human beings.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
