"People who didn't even know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about."

This sentence, from Karl Marlantes' superb novel "Matterhorn", pretty much encapsulates the war in Vietnam for many people, including some who served there. The war as a whole (its origins and machinations) was more complex, as all wars are, but mostly only to the politicians who started and sustained it. Marlantes, who served as a Marine Lieutenant in Vietnam and earned various combat medals, basically ignores the political aspect and concentrates on the experience of the grunt on the ground. There are no discussions about Communism vs. Imperialism or whether Johnson should have reacted as he did to the Gulf of Tonkin incident; there is only the drudgery of endless patrols, jungle rot, leeches, C-rations, etc. occasionally interrupted by a rather intense confrontation with the North Vietnamese Army.

Marlantes, who spent over thirty years writing this book (and could probably cover his house with all the rejection letters from various publishers), centers his story on Lieutenant Mellas, a new platoon commander who has to earn the respect of his men and rally them through the backbreaking work of building new bunkers for Matterhorn, their fire support base that stands just a few miles from North Vetnam. He then has to lead them out after their commander, Colonel Simpson, orders them to abandon it. The company has to trudge through the jungle to relieve another group of Marines who stumble onto them, more dead than alive.

In the climax, Mellas leads his marines through a seemingly hopeless assault to take Matterhorn back from the enemy, again on the orders of Col. Simpson. This is a theme that runs through the novel: the idea that a superior officer you've never met can put your life in severe danger mostly, apparently, for the benefit of his own career. Mellas, a college boy, certainly has an interest in his own career, but that gradually takes a back seat to survival as he sees his marines being shot and blown apart with no clear objective. At one point, he admits to his friend, Lt. Hawke, his desire to bring a medal home that will look good on his resume. Hawke replies: "Look. Everyone wants a medal...It's just that after you've been out here long enough to see what they cost, they don't seem so f**king shiny."

"Matterhorn" runs nearly 600 pages long, and it's well worth the investment of time. It's a stunning epic of a war story, definitely on a par with "Fields Of Fire" by James Webb (another Vietnam vet) and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried". Its moral, as with most great war stories, is simple, best put by the late journalist Michael Kelly: "In war there are winners and losers, and then there are the truly screwed."