What It Is Like to Go to War

Karl Marlantes

Aug 2011 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

About this ebook

“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest” memoir of war and its aftershocks from the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn (The Atlantic).
 
In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat, killing the enemy and watching friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences.
 
In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes takes a candid look at these experiences and critically examines how we might better prepare young soldiers for war. In the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion, and literature—which also helped bring them home. While contemplating ancient works from Homer to the Mahabharata, Marlantes writes of the daily contradictions modern warriors are subject to, of being haunted by the face of a young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters, and of how he finally found a way to make peace with his past. Through it all, he demonstrates just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of the journey.
 
In this memoir, the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn offers “a well-crafted and forcefully argued work that contains fresh and important insights into what it’s like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche” (The Washington Post).

Ratings and reviews

There are many aspects to this book, it is a memior, retrospective, exploration of the psychology of the warrior and look at how to keep from destroying the mind of our soldiers while they are active and when they are re-integrating into society. Full of insight this is a must read for anyone who thinks about the effect war has on our soldiers and how we can reduce the damage it causes.

I saw Marlantes on CSPAN following the Savannah book fair and was intrigued to follow up.Salient differences between the current military action in the Middle East and the Viet Nam war are: the distance between robot targets and trigger pullers; the rapid transition from the battle front to the home front; and, the realities for females mixed with young males in the combat zone.The author puts human faces on the enemies and how true that has been for all wars but makes distinctions between "western" foes and the Japanese. I suppose ptsd is another common result from all wars but by different names, e.g. shell shock. Marlantes attacks the glorification of war yet introduces the "shadow" concept to explain the elation felt by some. (George Patton reportedly said how he perversely loved war.)

I was a grunt in Vietnam in 1968-1969, I lived a very similar time in combat as Mr. Marlantes. I was wounded a total of five separate times, the last wound sent me home. This book as well as MATTERHORN, brought back lots of memories. Semper Fi!

About the author

A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the author of Matterhorn, which won numerous prizes, including the William E. Colby Award given by the Pritzker Military Library, the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the 2011 Indies' Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction. He lives in rural Washington.