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 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.?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.
關於作者：
A graduate of Yale University and 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. This is
his first novel.
內容試閱：
MATTERHORN A NOVEL OF THE VIETNAM WAR By KARL MARLANTES
Atlantic Monthly Press Copyright ? 2010 Karl Marlantes All right
reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8021-1928-5 Chapter One Mellas stood beneath
the gray monsoon clouds on the narrow strip of cleared ground
between the edge of the jungle and the relative safety of the
perimeter wire. He tried to focus on counting the other thirteen
Marines of the patrol as they emerged single file from the jungle,
but exhaustion made focusing difficult. He also tried,
unsuccessfully, to shut out the smell of the shit, which sloshed in
the water that half-filled the open latrine pits above him on the
other side of the wire. Rain dropped from the lip of his helmet,
fell past his eyes, and spattered onto the satiny olive cloth that
held the armor plating of his cumbersome new flak jacket. The dark
green T-shirt and boxer shorts that his mother had dyed for him
just three weeks ago clung to his skin, heavy and clammy beneath
his camouflage utility jacket and trousers. He knew there would be
leeches clinging to his legs, arms, back, and chest beneath his wet
clothes, even though he couldn''t feel them now. It was the way with
leeches, he mused. They were so small and thin before they started
sucking your blood that you rarely felt them unless they fell on
you from a tree, and you never felt them piercing your skin. There
was some sort of natural anesthetic in their saliva. You would
discover them later, swollen with blood, sticking out from your
skin like little pregnant bellies. When the last Marine entered the
maze of switchbacks and crude gates in the barbed wire, Mellas
nodded to Fisher, the squad leader, one of three who reported to
him. "Eleven plus us three," he said. Fisher nodded back, put his
thumb up in agreement, and entered the wire. Mellas followed him,
trailed by his radio operator, Hamilton. The patrol emerged from
the wire, and the young Marines climbed slowly up the slope of the
new fire support base, FSB Matterhorn, bent over with fatigue,
picking their way around shattered stumps and dead trees that gave
no shelter. The verdant underbrush had been hacked down with K-bar
knives to clear fields of fire for the defensive lines, and the
jungle floor, once veined with rivulets of water, was now only
sucking clay. The thin, wet straps of Mellas''s two cotton
ammunition bandoleers dug into the back of his neck, each with the
weight of twenty fully loaded M-16 magazines. These straps had
rubbed him raw. All he wanted to do now was get back to his hooch
and take them off, along with his soaking boots and socks. He also
wanted to go unconscious. That, however, wasn''t possible. He knew
he would finally have to deal with the nagging problem that Bass,
his platoon sergeant, had laid on him that morning and that he had
avoided by using the excuse of leaving on patrol. A black kid-he
couldn''t remember the name; a machine gunner in Third Squad-was
upset with the company gunnery sergeant, whose name he couldn''t
remember either. There were forty new names and faces in Mellas''s
platoon alone, and almost 200 in the company, and black or white
they all looked the same. It overwhelmed him. From the skipper
right on down, they all wore the same filthy tattered camouflage,
with no rank insignia, no way of distinguishing them. All of them
were too thin, too young, and too exhausted. They all talked the
same, too, saying fuck, or some adjective, noun, or adverb with
fuck in it, every four words. Most of the intervening three words
of their conversations dealt with unhappiness about food, mail,
time in the bush, and girls they had left behind in high school.
Mellas swore he''d succumb to none of it. This black kid wanted out
of the bush to have his recurrent headaches examined, and some of
the brothers were stirring things up in support. The gunnery
sergeant thought the kid was malingering and should have his butt
kicked. Then another black kid refused to have his hair cut and
people were up in arms about that. Mellas was supposed to be
fighting a war. No one at the Basic School had said he''d be dealing
with junior Malcolm X''s and redneck Georgia crackers. Why couldn''t
the Navy corpsmen just decide shit like whether headaches were real
or not? They were supposed to be the medical experts. Did the
platoon commanders on Iwo Jima have to deal with crap like this? As
Mellas plodded slowly up the hill, with Fisher next to him and
Hamilton automatically following with the radio, he became
embarrassed by the sound his boots made as they pulled free of the
mud, fearing that it would draw attention to the fact that they
were still shiny and black. He quickly covered for this by
complaining to Fisher about the squad''s machine gunner, Hippy,
making too much noise when Fisher had asked for the machine gun to
come to the head of the small column because the point man thought
he''d heard movement. Just speaking about the recent near-encounter
with an enemy Mellas had not yet seen started his insides humming
again, the vibration of fear that was like a strong electric
potential with no place to discharge. Part of him was relieved that
it had been a near miss but another part acted peeved that the
noise might have cost them an opportunity for action, and this
peevishness in turn irked Fisher. When they reached the squad''s
usual position in the company lines, Mellas could see that Fisher
could barely contain his own annoyance by the way he nearly threw
to the ground the three staves he''d cut for himself and a couple of
friends while out on the patrol. These staves were raw material for
short-timer''s sticks, elaborately carved walking sticks, roughly an
inch and a half in diameter and three to five feet long. Some were
simple calendars, others works of folk art. Each stick was marked
in a way that showed how many days its owner had survived on his
thirteen-month tour of duty and how many days were left to go.
Mellas had also been anxious about the sound Fisher had made
cutting the three staves with a machete, but he had said nothing.
He was still in a delicate position: nominally in charge of the
patrol, because he was the platoon commander, but until he was
successfully broken in he was also under the orders of Lieutenant
Fitch, the company commander, to do everything Fisher said. Mellas
had accepted the noise for two reasons, both political. Fitch had
basically said Fisher was in charge, so why buck Fitch? Fitch was
the guy who could promote Mellas to executive officer, second in
command, when Second Lieutenant Hawke rotated out of the bush. That
would put him in line for company commander-unless Hawke wanted it.
A second reason was that Mellas hadn''t been sure if the noise was
dangerous, and he was far more worried about asking stupid
questions than finding out. Too many stupid comments and dumb
questions at this stage could make it more difficult to gain the
respect of the platoon, and it was a lot harder to get ahead if the
snuffs didn''t like you or thought you were incompetent. The fact
that Hawke, his predecessor, had been nearly worshipped by the
platoon did not help matters. Mellas and Hamilton left Fisher at
Second Squad''s line of holes and slowly climbed up a slope so steep
that when Mellas slipped backward in the mud he barely had to bend
his knee to stop himself. Hamilton, bowed nearly double with the
weight of the radio, kept poking its antenna into the slope in
front of him. The fog that swirled around them obscured their goal:
a sagging makeshift shelter they had made by snapping their
rubberized canvas ponchos together and hanging the ponchos over a
scrap of communication wire strung only four feet above the ground
between two blasted bushes. This hooch, along with two others that
stood just a few feet away from it, formed what was called, not
without irony, the platoon command post. Mellas wanted to crawl
inside his hooch and make the world disappear, but he knew this
would be stupid and any rest would be short. It would be dark in a
couple of hours, and the platoon had to set out trip flares in case
any soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army-the NVA-approached. After
that, the platoon had to rig the claymore mines, which were placed
in front of their
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