I cannot do a better review than this one for the novel Matterhorn by Karl Merlantes. All I can add is a few comments about a book destined to become a war classic:1) the author manages to capture the fact that the entire USA managed to lose the Vietnam war. It wasn't solely the fault of the politicians, glory seeking ambitious officers, grunts in the field, or the protesters back home. The racial conflicts, the class conflicts, the indecisive political conflicts... all contributed to the unrest and unpopularity of the war. Merlantes describes all that.
2) War is full of injustices, and Merlantes spends quite a bit of time documenting those injustices... so much so that I quickly tired of it. Fighting in Vietnam was no different than fighting in Korea, or Guadalcanal, or Bastogne, at least for the foot soldier. Merlantes spends about half the book getting to that point.. but he DOES get there.
3) two small things really bothered me, and illustrates the absolute lunacy of war and those who attempt to wage it... first was the military policy on the scouts (recon soldiers using dogs); when the soldier rotated home, the dog was destroyed because they wouldn't or couldn't retrain the dog to work with another soldier... the scout in the book had reupped (volunteered for another 6 month tour) twice so that his dog wouldn't be killed. The second thing was that when a soldier was wounded and evacced to a hospital ship, he was basicly stolen blind. He had to PAY to get a new weapon(s) when he returned to his unit because the sailors on the damned hospital ship stole and sold his weapons.
There's not a lot of new information in this book about the conflict in Vietnam. I'm sure that in 20 or 30 years (maybe sooner) we will have similar books written about Iraq & Afghanistan.
