Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are … Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.Â
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
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A down-in-the-mud Vietnam war story that’s so real that you feel you are out in the Jungle with those marines
If more people read this and admired the length of time it took to write, we would have less wars today!
This an incredibly good and hard novel about one of man’s stupidest inventions: war. The war in these pages has nothing of heroic, exciting or adventurous; you can leave that to Hollywood blockbusters. The novel moves at a brisk pace but never let’s you really catch your bearings; somehow I imagine this must be the same confusing feeling one has …