Here’s the Story: A Guest Post by Karl Marlantes

From a man who’s seen it all, Karl Marlantes penned an essay on the rich family history that inspired his latest novel, Cold Victory.

Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer is, “Everywhere.” My wife will be talking about something, and too many times I become aware of her asking me where I went. Once I told her I was imagining what it might be like to be inside a whale. I’ve not yet heard the last of that. Another time, I awoke to an image of my grandmother looking out the window at the Columbia River. I thought, what a life she must have led. That led to a pretty hefty novel: my last book, Deep River.

But my new novel, Cold Victory, came from a story my Uncle Dick told me when I was in middle school. Dick was a West Point graduate and career Army officer who served in the Pacific during World War Two. He’d been rapidly promoted and was a full Colonel before he was forty. His wife, my Aunt Mildred, was a native Finnish speaker. Dick had shown a gift for language at West Point. So, with the advantage of a wife fluent in Finnish and Finnish culture, he applied for and was given the job of Military Attaché in Helsinki. With the help of his wife and father-in-law he was fluent in Finnish by the time he and his family arrived in Helsinki in 1953.

Here’s the story:

Dick was a good cross-country skier. He’d fought in the Aleutians, so knew arctic conditions. Because of this experience, he was invited in March, 1955, to accompany the cadets of the Finnish Cadet Academy on its annual cross-country ski march. This trek started north of the Arctic circle and ended, after six days and  two-hundred and five miles in brutal conditions, in Kajaani, a town in Central Finland. The year before, a British assistant military attaché attempted to keep up with the cadets but dropped out on the fourth day.

When the ever-suspicious officials in the Soviet Embassy learned that Dick would attempt the march, they sent along an assistant army attaché, Lieutenant Colonel P. A. Zukov, presumably to keep an eye on Dick. Uncle Dick said Zukov was one of the few Soviet officers he actually liked. Zukov quit after the second day. Dick completed the trek, losing over 6 percent of his body weight. During a press conference the morning after the trek ended, he learned to his surprise that the regional newspapers had described in detail each day’s march. The Finnish press had to follow national policy and say nothing directly critical of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union in the previous decade had usurped around 11% of Finnish land and continually threatened Finnish independence. The appearance of a 39-year-old American colonel out-skiing a younger Soviet lieutenant colonel provided Finnish newspaper writers with an outlet for their pent-up resentments and frustrations. They played the story for everything they could get out of it, inferring that the trek was an unofficial cross-country ski race between two superpower attachés. The papers described Zukov’s choice to leave the march prematurely and return to Helsinki in a warm comfortable staff car with great relish. The leading papers in Helsinki, and then in other Nordic countries picked up these local stories and printed them as fact, which attracted the attention of the international news services, which dutifully relayed the stories to large newspapers all over the world.

Shortly after the race, Zukov disappeared.

When the Soviet Union invaded Ukraine in 2014 and America and Europe naively let it happen, I decided to turn that story into a novel. I’d finished the first draft when Russia tried to take the whole country in 2022.