Matterhorn : a novel of the Vietnam War

Thirty-five years have passed since the fall of Saigon, but the Vietnam War has never really loosened its grip on the American imagination. Even people born years after the war have the painful images burned into their minds ? Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the little girl running down the street after being burned in a napalm attack; South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a handcuffed Viet Cong soldier in full sight of a television camera. There's no such thing as a kind or gentle war, but the sheer brutality and hopelessness of Vietnam set the tone for American conversations about war and foreign policy for decades after.

We've all seen, at some point, the Vietnam War dramatized on television or acted out in film. But it's impossible, of course, for anyone who wasn't there to fully gauge the horror and violence that American and Vietnamese soldiers encountered every minute of every day. In his debut novel, Matterhorn, Vietnam combat veteran Karl Marlantes attempts to transport his readers to 1969, in a jungle near Laos, just south of the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone ? DMZ ? where a company of young U.S. Marines are fighting for their lives in a war none of them really understands. And while no one who didn't serve in Vietnam can really grasp what life in that time, that place, was like, Marlantes comes closer than any American writer ever has to capturing the unrelenting terror and enormity of one of the saddest chapters in recent world history.