Matterhorn

by Karl Marlantes

It occurred to him that because of his desire to look good coming home from a war, he might never come home at all.

Hawke had learned long ago that what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted.

Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched everything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him. A burst of machine-gun bullets cracked over his head as he ran parallel to the contour of the hill to try and help get the squads back together again. He heard screams for a corpsman. He ran toward the sounds and found Doc Fredrickson already there. Two kids were down, one still breathing raggedly, the other shot through the upper teeth, a

Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.

assault by Bravo Company would surely go badly, but those were the breaks. They were there to kill gooks. If they ran into a buzz saw, Mulvaney would get the whole fucking regiment involved and finally

He’d choose to stay on the hill and do what he could to save those around him. The choice comforted him and calmed him down. Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live.

He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares. It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away. His killing that day would not have been evil if the dead soldiers hadn’t been loved by mothers, sisters,

Being human was the best he could do. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all. He laughed at the cosmic joke, but he felt heartsick.

“Between the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, falls the shadow,” Mellas said. He attempted a

Emotion constricted Hawke’s throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thing—the human thing. To live, succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride. The next afternoon, after the battalion staff was withdrawn, the company was ferried back to VCB. It was Sunday. Father Riordan, the battalion chaplain, thought it would be comforting to hold a memorial service. The colonel and

He knew that all of them were shadows: the chanters, the dead, the living. All shadows, moving across this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the pattern of things as they moved but leaving nothing changed when they left. Only the shadows themselves could change.