“Karl Marlantes has written a staggeringly beautiful book on combat—what it feels like, what the consequences are and above all, what society must do to understand it. In my eyes he has become the preeminent literary voice on war of our generation. He is a natural storyteller and a deeply profound thinker who not only illuminates war for civilians, but also offers a kind of spiritual guidance to veterans themselves. As this generation of warriors comes home, they will be enormously helped by what Marlantes has written—I’m sure he will literally save lives.”—Sebastian Junger The New Yorker What It Is Like to Go to War is 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 What It Is Like to Go to War a second Marlantes book resides on the top shelf of American literature.”—Anthony Swofford , author of Jarhead What It Is Like to Go to War ought to be mandatory reading by potential infantry recruits and by residents of any nation that sends its kids—Marlantes’s word—into combat.”—San Francisco Chronicle People Magazine The Atlantic Time.com BookPage Huffington Post What It Is Like To Go To War , cautions his audience to understand the cost to the human psyche in sending others to kill in our names or for policies decided by politicians determined to use (and abuse) the power entrusted to their office.”—Daily Planet What It Is Like to Go to War is a deeply personal account of dealing with his harrowing time as a Marine Corps officer in Vietnam. . . . Marlantes’ fiction might be just too wrenching for some readers to believe.”—Logos Parameters What it is Like to Go to War is already considered by many a modern classic. . . . The former Marine has three main goals in this unflinchingly honest look at what it means to be a soldier in a war: to let potential soldiers understand what to expect, to help veterans better cope with what they’ve experienced, and to help policy makers truly comprehend what it means when they send combat troops into a war zone.”—Bradenton Herald Gunnery Sergeant Terence D’Alesandro , 3rd Batallion, 5th Marines, U.S. Marine CorpsPublishers Weekly Kirkus Reviews What It Is Like to Go to War offers profound insight on how we must prepare our youth who become our warriors for their hard and uncompromising journey through war’s hell and back home again.”—Vietnam Magazine The Minneapolis Star Tribune St. Louis Dispatch Seattle Weekly What It Is Like to Go to War is a courageous, noble and intelligent grapple with myth, history, and spirituality that beautifully elevates the cultural conversation on the role of the military in today’s world. It is an emotional, honest, and affecting primer for all Americans on war and the national psyche, and we ignore this book at our own peril.”—Ed Conklin , Chaucer’s Books, Santa Barbara
…brilliant…a well crafted and forcefully argued work of nonfiction that contains fresh and important insights into what it's like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche. At heart, the book is a from-the-gut psychological and philosophical meditation on what happens to human beings in combat and afterward. In delivering those insights, Marlantes recreates his own wartime experience and his subsequent decades of emotional difficulties.
Marlantes, author of the highly acclaimed novel Matterhorn, reflects in this wrenchingly honest memoir on his time in Vietnam: what it means to go into the combat zone and kill and, most importantly, what it means to truly come home. After graduating from Yale, Marlantes attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. But not wanting to hide behind privilege while others fought in his place, he left Oxford in 1967 to ship out to Vietnam as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He eschews straight chronology for a blend of in-country reporting and the paradoxical sense of both fear and exhilaration a soldier feels during war. Most importantly, Marlantes underscores the need for returning veterans to be counseled properly; an 18-year-old cannot "kill someone and contain it in a healthy way." Digging as deeply into his own life as he does into the larger sociological and moral issues, Marlantes presents a riveting, powerfully written account of how, after being taught to kill, he learned to deal with the aftermath. Citing a Navajo tale of two warriors who returned home to find their people feared them until they learned to sing about their experience, Marlantes learns the lesson, concluding, "This book is my song," (Sept.)
Writing primarily to come to terms with his own experience in combat, Marlantes (Matterhorn) delivers an excruciatingly honest and insightful reflection of how a soldier subjectively processes war, death, killing, and surviving. We follow his narrative and self-examination from the Vietnamese jungle, where he fought as a marine, to coming home to a public reception as a soldier and an inward acceptance as an individual engaged in the timeless human battle. Not seeking acceptance of conflict and destruction, not a raw account bent on preaching pacifism as a substitute for war, his book instead urges us to recognize the feeling of transcendence and the psychological and spiritual intensity of war and to develop an awareness of its costs. VERDICT A gutting look into the psyche of a soldier, adding flesh to the often flat and stereotyped personage. Humanizing, empathetic, and wise, this reading experience will light corners in the human experience often judged dark.—Ben Malczewski, Ypsilanti Dist. Lib., MI
Bronson Pinchot does an outstanding job of presenting Karl Marlantes’s memoir of war, trauma, and recovery. Marlantes tells the harrowing story of his time in Vietnam and how it affected him for three decades after. His story is directed to fellow combat veterans, their families, and those who make policy about them—but it’s of interest to everyone. Refreshingly, Rhodes Scholar Marlantes doesn’t present himself as a faceless everyman but employs the full range of his considerable intelligence. Pinchot deftly follows as Marlantes shifts from well-told battle stories to policy analysis, then to Jungian archetypes, and back again. His tone is sometimes matter-of-fact and sometimes passionate (almost shouting) in marvelous synchrony with the author's words. F.C. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2011 - AudioFile
A manual for soldiers or anyone interested in what can happen to mind, body and spirit in the extreme circumstances of war.
Decorated Vietnam veteran Marlantes is also the author of a bestselling novel (Matterhorn , 2010), a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar. His latest book reflects both his erudition and his battle-hardness, taking readers from the Temple of Mars and Joseph Campbell's hero's journey into the hell of combat and its grisly aftermath. That Marlantes has undertaken such a project implies his acceptance of war as a permanent fact of human life. We go to war, he says, "reluctantly and sadly" to eliminate an evil, just as one must kill a mad dog, "because it is a loathsome task that a conscious person sometimes has to do." He believes volunteers rather than conscripts make the best soldiers, and he accepts that the young, who thrill at adventure and thrive on adrenaline, should be war's heavy lifters. But apologizing for war is certainly not one of the strengths, or even aims, of the book. Rather, Marlantes seeks to prepare warriors for the psychic wounds they may endure in the name of causes they may not fully comprehend. In doing that, he also seeks to explain to nonsoldiers (particularly policymakers who would send soldiers to war) the violence that war enacts on the whole being. Marlantes believes our modern states fail where "primitive" societies succeeded in preparing warriors for battle and healing their psychic wounds when they return. He proposes the development of rituals to practice during wartime, to solemnly pay tribute to the terrible costs of war as they are exacted, rather than expecting our soldiers to deal with them privately when they leave the service. He believes these rituals, in absolving warriors of the guilt they will and probably should feel for being expected to violate all of the sacred rules of civilization, could help slow the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war's awesome consequences for human beings.
