Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs…
So begins The Iliad, by the blind poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.), and so, more or less, begins Western literature, with the story of the Greek and Trojan war. For centuries, readers have found this blood-soaked epic mesmerizing, even somehow contemporary, in its appeal. The bravery of Hector, the cunning of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), the beauty of Helen, the strength of Achilles (except for his heel!), the sleaziness of Pandaros, the wisdom of Nestor: for centuries, these, and more, characters from Homer's epic have inspired readers, writers and artists (not to mention hucksters: the Honda Odyssey or "Use Ajax, the foaming cleanser…"
This week I thought of The Iliad while reading Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, perhaps the best American war novel since The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer's graphic account about the Pacific campaign in World War II.
Matterhorn — a cross between Mailer's book and The Bridge Over the River Kwai — tells the story of a Marine platoon during the Vietnam War, trying valiantly and senselessly to take, hold and retake a useless hill, Matterhorn. Like Mailer, Marlantes wrote from experience: Mailer fought in the Philippines, and Marlantes was a much-decorated Marine — including two Purple Hearts — in the Vietnam struggle. Unlike Mailer, who'd already written a play called The Naked and the Dead and volunteered to fight in the South Pacific in order to write about it, Marlantes, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, took 30 years to finish his gripping saga (Mailer wrote his in two years, in Paris). Both, at 600+ pages, are serious tomes.
What's the attraction of war novels? Tolstoy's War and Peace, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, James Jones's From Here to Eternity and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 come to mind right away, not to mention Beowulf, the Arthurian legends… supply your own, the list is endless.
First of all, the good ones aren't political in the regular sense — in Matterhorn, there's no discussion of our Vietnam policy — but focus on the actions and reactions of men (mostly men) under extreme stress. I think readers, men and women alike, wonder about how they themselves would behave. Can we become better than the ordinary mildly selfish people that we seem to be in our everyday lives?
This isn't just a matter of courage. It involves endurance, compassion, intelligence and — finally — generosity. In all these stories, breathtaking deeds of selflessness and unpredictable self-sacrifice spring out of our flawed human nature: soldiers take wild chances, and give up their lives for people they don't even like.
Another reason is that these "war" novels present a microcosm of our society working in close proximity, like Tolstoy's serfs and landowners or Mailer's college-educated officers and blue-collar soldiers. In Marlantes' book, we see America's black-white schism more starkly than in any radical sociological study. The prejudice, suspicion and anger in the Marine platoon has the ring of lived truth; it has no happy ending, and yet in certain circumstances, the soldiers rise above both class and race.
The good war novel (like a good crime novel, as Dennis Lehane has pointed out) is really a social novel, and the stress the soldiers face not only brings out their heroism and patriotism, but reflects the even more destructive battles of their societies. A repeated detail in Matterhorn is that the Marines hate their allies, the South Vietnamese, whom they consider corrupt impediments in the war, while the tough and dedicated Vietcong are worthy adversaries.
Like Charles Dickens, war novelists tend to sympathize with the underclass — they make them real, not caricatures like Cadillac Mary (President Reagan) or immigrants beheading Arizonians (Gov. Jan Brewer). These novelists let the stupidity of leaders and the cruelty of wars play out in the horrific action without comment, in the midst of a stirring tale.
Despite, or because of, the heartbreaking and stunning bravery of the Marines in Matterhorn, I finished the book not just flooded with sympathy, pity and admiration, but thinking this: Mr. Obama, get us out of Afghanistan as fast as you possibly can!
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—from "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
–PFC Peter Meinke was polishing tanks in Würzburg, Germany, in 1956, when the Russians invaded Budapest, but President Eisenhower wisely refrained from sending in U.S. troops. Peter and Jeanne will read & talk at the Times' Festival of Reading, October 23rd.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.