After nearly four decades of brooding about Vietnam, military service, the meaning of masculinity in America and other weighty topics, Marlantes has yet to develop a concise or unified theory. “What It Is Like,” then, is much like the years - mid-1960s to early 1970s - that it covers: complex, contradictory, messy and alternately high-minded and self-absorbed. His attempt to find literary and psychological references to explain combat is another matter some of the references work, some are a graduate-school stretch. Grief itself is a healthy response.”Īs any reader of “Matterhorn” knows, Marlantes is top-notch in describing ground combat and its morally brutalizing effect on warriors. The drugs, alcohol, and suicides are ways of avoiding guilt and fear of grief. “They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war. “We cannot expect a normal eighteen-year-old to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way,” he explains. But the passion and self-revealing pain of “What It Is Like” make it a must-read for anyone interested in that now long-ago war, the men who fought it, and the country that, in its confusion and political turmoil, treated many of those soldiers shabbily.Ī glance at recent headlines about suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans shows that Marlantes’ concern is not specific to the Vietnam veteran.
See Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” or the stories of Tim O’Brien. It isn’t that Marlantes has a particularly unique take on the horrors of Vietnam or the ill treatment afforded returning veterans.
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