Matterhorn

by Karl Marlantes

The light died. Voices were silenced. Darkness and fear replaced light and reason. The whisper of a leaf scraping on bark would make heads turn involuntarily and hearts gallop. The surrounding blackness and the unseen wall of dripping growth left no place to run. In that black wet nothingness the perimeter became just a memory. Only imagination gave it form.

Cassidy folded his cards in his hands. “What the fuck’s psychosomatic except another fancy word for someone who doesn’t want to do something that’s hard and scary? Nerves don’t break down—they give up. I’ve got a psychosomatic pain in the ass with all these fucking yardbirds. Go watch the sick bay the day before we shove off on an operation. Every nigger in the battalion’s waiting in line. Mallory ain’t no different.”

“I’d like to put Rider and his team in for some sort of medals,” Mellas said. “They did a hell of a job today.” Hawke didn’t answer right away. He was watching the small bubbles forming at the bottom of the cup and wiping at the slight tears caused by the heat tab. “This isn’t the Air Force, Mellas.” “No shit it isn’t. We did a hell of a job out there today.” As soon as he said it, Mellas knew he’d slipped. He felt his face starting to redden. “I didn’t mean—” “The fuck you didn’t mean.” Hawke looked up quickly at Mellas, eyes flashing for a moment. He resumed watching the can. Mellas knew that Hawke was letting him squirm. Then, without looking up, Hawke said, “Look, Mellas, in the Navy or Air Force they give you a medal for what the Marines consider just doing their job. In the Marines you only get a medal for being braver than just doing your job.” Then he looked at Mellas. “You get in fixes where medals are handed out because you were unlucky and had to fix things or because you were stupid and had to fix things. Be careful about what you’re wishing for.”

Hippy kept thinking of the girl who had first told him about meditating one night when he was on liberty from Camp Pendleton. He tried to concentrate on the now of the pain. She had told him that if he was uncomfortable on his knees in meditation, it was only because he was thinking about the time stretching before him. “Are you able to stand it now?” she had asked him. “Yes,” he replied. “And now?” “Yes” he had replied again. And now, the pain of putting his foot down hit him, but he could stand it. And now, on the other foot, but again he could survive. And now. And now. The hunger was nothing.

“Because Fitch doesn’t know how to play the fucking game. That’s why. He’s a good combat leader. I’d literally follow him to my death. But he’s not a good company commander in this kind of war. He got on Simpson’s bad side because he got his picture in the paper too often and never gave Simpson credit, which by the way he doesn’t deserve, but that’s the point. The smart guy gives the guy with the power the credit, whether he deserves it or not. That way the smart guy is dangling something the boss wants. So the smart guy now has power over the boss.” Mellas kept his mouth shut. “It used to be if you were out in the bush operating independently like we are, no one would second-guess the skipper. They didn’t have the radio power back then. Now they do, and the fucking brass think they’re out on patrol. And now the smallest units are run by the colonels and generals, hell, right up to the president. Colonel and above used to be the level where people dealt with all the political shit like congressmen on junkets, television, reporters, you name it. But now those guys are running the show right down to this fucking river canyon and we’re in the politics too. And the better the radios, the worse it’s going to get. The politics is going to come right down to the company level, and people like Fitch and Scar are going to be culled out and people like you will take over.”

Mellas looked at the tableau of friends around him. Some of them would very likely be dead in an hour. Fracasso, who was barely old enough to drink, really showed his fear. He was writing everything he could in his notebook, bouncing up and down in a crouch, his teeth bared in a tense grin. Goodwin, the hunter, was nervous, like a runner before a race, possessing some primitive ability to lead men into situations where death was the understood payoff. Kendall, worried sick, his face pallid, his helmet already on his head, was leading a platoon that didn’t trust him. Fitch, at age twenty-three, had already worn responsibility that most men only debated about. He was now taking 190 kids into battle, and his decisions would determine how many came back. The kids: dreaming of R & R, or remembering the R & R from which they’d just returned, some savoring a memory of smooth brown skin pressed against their own, a few remembering wives left behind at antiseptic airports. And Mellas: in less than an hour there could be no Mellas. The radio crackled to life. “It’s a go, sir,” Relsnik said gravely. Everyone looked at everyone else.

What, moments before, had been organized movement now disintegrated into confusion, noise, and blood. The attack might have looked as if it were still being directed by the leaders, but it wasn’t. It went forward because each Marine knew what to do. 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.

By taking Helicopter Hill, Bravo Company had put itself directly in the northern regiment’s line of march. This forced the NVA to either blast Bravo out or isolate it like a tumor and move around it, hammering it with mortars and perhaps artillery. The only alternative was to take an extremely slow and difficult detour through the jungle-choked valleys beneath the ridgeline. So G2 was betting that the NVA would attack Bravo—but not until it could mass sufficient forces. This was going to be a race. Division assumed that the NVA would assume that the Marines knew what was happening. The Marines considered the NVA to be professionals and gave them due respect. It was no accident that they had decided to move in when the Marine artillery was pulled back for the Cam Lo operation. The high card in the Marines’ hand, however, was that the NVA probably didn’t know how quickly the Marines could put it all back into place if they got a break in the weather. The NVA, moving within the confines of the ridgeline, would be safe as long as the clouds held. Since the North Vietnamese moved on foot, the weather didn’t affect them as much as it did the Marines, and they would be in a position to overrun Bravo in the next day or so. If the clouds lifted, the superior mobility of the Marines would enable them to intercept the NVA, fix them in place, and inflict considerable damage. The longer Bravo held out, the better the chance of a good regiment-size battle, doing considerable damage to t...

Being besieged is like any other variation of war. Behind the immediate terror of killing one another is tedious, spirit-destroying boredom.

There came a moment during the lull when Mellas, lost at the center of the swirling fog, knew beyond any ability to lie to himself that he had, indeed, killed Pollini—and he was overwhelmed by an emptiness that knocked him to his knees. Slumped in his wet hole, cocooned by two flak jackets, he broke. He was the butt of a cruel joke. God had given him life and must have laughed as Mellas used it to kill Pollini, to get a piece of ribbon to show proof of his worth. And it was his worth that was the joke. He was nothing but a collection of empty events that would end as a faded photograph above his parents’ fireplace. They too would die, and relatives who didn’t know who was in the picture would throw it away. Mellas knew, in his rational mind, that if there was no afterlife, death was no different from sleep. But this cruel flood was not from his rational mind. It had none of the ephemerality of thought. It was as real as the mud he sat in. Thought was just more of the nothing that he had done all his life. The fact of his eventual death shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. He could only squeal in pain. His mind jumped in. We’ll escape. Play dead when they finally overwhelm us. Don’t use the knife—play dead and use the confusion of that last assault to cover your escape. You’ll be alive! Leave these Marines and this false notion of honor. Get into the jungle with the rest of the animals and hide and be alive. Alive! But the terrier shaking him by the neck laughed. And the...

At a very deep level, Mellas simply wanted to stand on a body that he had laid low. Watching Goodwin with more than a little envy, he had to admit that he wanted to kill because part of him was thrilled by killing.

Mellas went back to his hole and sat there, Jackson to his left, Doc Fredrickson to his right in another hole. They stared into the fog, listening to the sounds of digging all around them. The NVA weren’t leaving. All they could do was sit in the fog and listen to the digging and to Kendall and Genoa panting. Mellas stared at the gray nothingness before him. He kept trying to think of how he was going to work his way back to VCB when they got overrun. Mellas again counted machine-gun rounds. Enough for about one minute of firing—and that included the two captured Russian 7.62s. They’d evenly redistributed the rifle ammunition and come up with about one magazine per man. It took only three quick bursts on automatic to empty one. Mellas wondered if he should save all his ammunition, not fire at all, and crawl away through the darkness and terror when the NVA hit them. Marines never leave their dead or wounded. They’d never expect a single Marine to break the code and slip by them. He’d hump right out to VCB and safety. He’d hump right out of the war. The fantasy kept returning, with new details. But it remained a fantasy. A more dominant part of him would adhere to the code. He’d die before he’d abandon anyone. Nor would he surrender. The lecture from the Basic School floated into his memory. “A Marine never surrenders as long as he has the means to resist. And we teach you fucking numbies hand-to-hand combat. So if your hands are blown off, you can surrender—only you’ll hav...

“We might not make it,” he said. “I know,” Mellas answered. They couldn’t express what they were feeling. It had to do with eternity, friendship, lost opportunities—with the end. “You ever get down around Los Angeles?” Fitch asked. “Sure.” “If we make it out of here, why don’t you look me up? I’ll buy you a beer.” Mellas said he would. “God,” Fitch whispered. “A beer.”

“You really don’t understand it, do you?” Jackson said. “I guess not.” Jackson sighed. “Shit, Lieutenant. We might be dead in an hour or two, so I guess this isn’t any time for fucking around not saying what we mean. You OK with that?” “Not with the being dead in a couple of hours part,” Mellas answered. Jackson snorted approval. “OK, sir.” He paused. Then he said, “You’re a racist.” Mellas swallowed and looked open-mouthed at Jackson. “Now hold on.” Jackson said, obviously marshaling his words. “Don’t get all excited. I’m a racist too. You can’t grow up in America and not be a racist. Everyone on this fucking hill’s a racist and everyone back in the world’s a racist. Only there’s one big difference between us two racists you can’t ever change and I can’t ever change.” “What’s that?” Mellas asked. “Being racist helps you and it hurts me.” Jackson looked out at the distance. They were both quiet. Then Jackson said, “You know, China’s really got it right. We got to overturn a racist society. No easy thing.” He brightened. “There’s another difference between us racists.” Mellas kept quiet. “Some of us racists are prejudiced and some aren’t. Now you, I’d say you’re trying not to be prejudiced. Me too, and Cortell, and even Mole, though he’d never admit it. Hawke’s not prejudiced, flat out. Not being prejudiced is the best any of us can do right now. It’s too late about being racist.” “I don’t get it.” “How many black friends you got back in the world?” Mellas paused and looked...

“Mellas, stop for a second, huh?” Mellas looked up, straining through the ringing in his ears for whatever Hawke had to say. “I resent the shit out of you calling me a lifer.” Hawke’s words lodged like a heavy weight in Mellas’s stomach. “I was just kidding,” Mellas said. “I resent the shit out of it,” Hawke repeated. “I’m sorry,” Mellas said. “I didn’t mean it. My usual sarcasm.” He tried to think of how he could make it up to Hawke, but the words had been said. Mellas could only be forgiven. “Sometimes my mouth runs off faster than my brain,” he added lamely. “Than your heart, Mellas,” Hawke said. He was still visibly angry. “What the fuck do you think a lifer is? Do you really think he’s the same guy these kids think he is? It’s fucking easy for your kind. You’ll go back and be the fucking lifer’s superior for the rest of your life. What’s a guy like you even doing here? Slumming? These so-called fucking lifers don’t have any place to go like you do. And neither do the fucking snuffs. For most of them this is it. This is the top of their little hill. And people like you fly over it and shit on it. Goddamn superior fucking assholes.” “I didn’t mean to be putting people down,” Mellas mumbled. “Just don’t put down the good ones like Murphy and Cassidy. You’re going to go to law school. Where the hell’s Cassidy going to go? Here he counts for something. And you shit on it.” Mellas’s own temper was starting to rise. “What am I supposed to do, feel sorry for him? I suppose I ...

Mellas looked at the blood on his arms and hand, and at Jermain’s contorted face. Suddenly he seemed to be floating above the scene, watching the entire company. Everything was in slow motion and fuzzily quiet. Jermain was probably going to die. An explosion from Goodwin’s area rocked the hill. They’d now been behind the log slightly more than a minute. Mellas floated high above the hill. He saw the line of Marines stretched out below him, some kicking or contorted in pain, some lying still. He saw the people he knew, still alive, trying to stay alive, behind logs, in small defilades, many lying flat on the ground and attempting to merge with the earth. He studied the bunkers. He saw the interlocking fire as if in a drawing. He saw the machine gun Jermain had attacked—and he knew. He floated back to a tactics class at the Basic School where a redheaded major said that junior officers were mostly redundant because the corporals and sergeants could take care of just about anything. But there would come a time when the junior officers would earn every penny of their pay, and they would know when that time came. Mellas came back to the hill. His time had come. He saw the smoke from the burning napalm. He saw what would open the door through the interlocking fire, and it was right in front of him, shooting at him. Mellas keyed the handset. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo Five. Over.” As if from behind his own shoulder, Mellas watched himself telling Fitch the situation calmly over th...

Mellas redirected Jake’s M-79 fire to a second bunker just to the left of the NVA machine gun. He intended to use the projectiles to blind the people inside with smoke and mud. “You keep firing at the fucking entrance. No place else, no matter what I do,” he said. Jacobs nodded and loaded another projectile. Mellas pulled a grenade from his suspenders and whispered, “Dear God, help me now.” He felt that this was possibly his last moment of life, here behind this log with these comrades, and knew it was indescribably sweet. A longing sadness arose with the fear, and he looked one more time at his comrades’ intent faces. He wet his lips and said good-bye, silently, not wanting to leave the safety of the log and their warm bodies. Then he stood up and ran. He ran as he’d never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been chosen for him, his only choice being whether or not to play his part with heart and courage. He ran because fate had placed him in a position of responsibility and he had accepted the burden. He ran because his self-respect required it. He ran because he loved his friends and this was the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming them. He ran directly at the bunker where the grenades from Jake’s M-79 were exploding. The bullets from the M-60 machine gun slammed through the air to his right, slashing past him, whining like tortured cats, cracking like ...

Mellas spent the rest of the night trying to understand why Jackson had lost both legs while he himself seemed to bounce from near miss to near miss. He felt that somehow he had cheated. Then he laughed softly. What was he supposed to do, stand up and get blown away to make things up to the dead and the maimed? 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, friends, wives. Mellas understood that in destroying the fabric that linked those people, he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil, was a result of being human. 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. Hum...

“You’d see it differently if you were in our shoes,” she said. “And you’d see it differently if you were in ours,” Mellas replied. “There it is,” she said. She looked him in the eye and smiled warmly. “Look, I wasn’t trying to be prissy.” He noticed that her own eyes were green. Mellas could see that she was trying to connect with him. He melted and smiled back. “You’ve got to understand what we do here,” she said. She started to reach her hand toward him on the table, but checked it and put both hands on her coffee cup instead. “We fix weapons.” She shrugged. “Right now you’re a broken guidance system for forty rifles, three machine guns, a bunch of mortars, several artillery batteries, three calibers of naval guns, and four kinds of attack aircraft. Our job is to get you fixed and back in action as fast as we can.” “I know. I just don’t feel very much like a weapon right now.” “How often do you think I feel like a mechanic?” she shot back. Then she softened. “It’s not why I became a nurse.” She put her palms to the sides of her forehead and rested her elbows on the table. “I do get so tired of it all.” She looked up at him, no longer a Navy nurse, just an exhausted young woman. “There’s too many kids coming on board,” she finally said. “They’re lonesome. They’re in pain. They’re scared of dying.” She paused. “We can only patch the bodies. For all the other”—she searched for a word—“stuff, well, we try to keep our distance. It isn’t easy.” “There it is,” Mellas said. She ...

When Hawke rejoined Fitch and Pallack next to Fitch’s old bunker, he heard cries of “Tubing!” People everywhere scurried into holes. The mortar rounds came crashing in. Marines huddled in their holes, holding on to their helmets, praying, trying not to think, hear, or feel. Hawke crouched low next to the bunker entrance, staring out at his old company. Fitch and Goodwin walked side by side, leading the company silently off the hill. The Marines of Bravo Company followed, in silence, giving no apparent thought to the mortar shells, walking with their rifles slung on their shoulders. Exhausted, they were as indifferent as if the falling shells were rain. Some Marines from Delta Company poked their heads up from their holes and watched their comrades, as Hawke was doing. Some shook their heads and muttered, “Crazy motherfuckers.” Some let out a low whistle. Most were silent. 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.

Henry walked in. He struck the lighter and coolly looked at the splinters of his once solid ebony trunk, at his shrapnel-pitted dresser, the ripped seabags. “You gonna pay for this, China.” China knew Henry wasn’t talking about the furniture. He also knew that although Henry’s image had taken a hit, power always trumped image—and, he was beginning to learn, ideology. Power was the ability to reward and punish. Henry could reward with money and drugs. He could punish by withholding money and drugs. A nice combination. Ultimately, however, Henry wielded the power of punishment held only by a self-selected few. He was willing to murder. China knew that if a man could kill someone, everyone knew that he could kill anyone. The only way to stand up to that kind of power was to be willing to die. China walked back to the company area, uneasy and apprehensive.

Soon Mellas was deliciously high, so that the bourbon tasted smooth and cool while simultaneously warming his belly. It was a magical contrast. He was well aware of the moment, in spite of the bourbon. He knew that the five of them had shared experiences no one else had shared or would share. He also knew it was unlikely that all of them would live to share such a moment again. Indeed, he could be the one missing. All the gaiety in the world—all the shouting, all the pain-numbing drunkenness—would not conceal that lurking thought. But the lurking thought was what made him aware that this moment was precious. “Hey, Mel,” Hawke said, “when we get back to the world we ought to go into business or something. Shit, all five us. Wouldn’t that be a gas?” “With what we know, all we could do is compete with the Mafia,” Murphy said. “The only business you could ever run is a fucking bar,” McCarthy said. “But I’d run one with you.” “I’ll drink to that,” Hawke said, lifting his glass. “That’s it. A fucking bar.” He hiccupped. “A special fucking bar.” He giggled. “We’ll call it the Bunker.” “Naw,” Mellas said. “Not sophisticated enough. Call it Ellsworth.” “Fuck you and your sophistication, Jack,” Goodwin said. “We want a fucking bar, not some fairy discotheque.” “That’s right,” McCarthy said, “and to get a drink there you have to park your car four hundred meters away and cut through solid bamboo and elephant grass with a machete to find it.” Mellas thought for a moment. “Only you don...

The two were again quiet. The alcohol blurred Mellas’s vision and threatened to pull him into sleep. Then he surfaced again. “He still volunteered us, the poor fucking bastard. He’ll carry that a lot longer than a bad fitness report. And here I’ve been feeling bad because I enjoy killing people.” Hawke laughed quietly. “At least you’re over the hump on that one. It’s the people who don’t know it who are dangerous. There’s at least two hundred million of them back in the world. Boot camp doesn’t make us killers. It’s just a fucking finishing school.” He gave a bitter laugh. “I remember my ex-fucking squaw telling me it was inconceivable—that was her word, inconceivable—that she could ever go to Vietnam like I did, no matter what the consequences. This was just before she went to Europe for her junior year and met her new boyfriend.”

He stood and looked at Mole and China. He wanted to beat them senseless, cut their tongues out, for keeping quiet until it was too late. He wanted to scream accusations of murder and send them to prison. At the same time he knew that nothing would be gained but more bitterness. Justice in the midst of war was a scrap of paper in the wind. If he implicated Henry, he would drag in China and Mole, and he didn’t want to do that. Their only sin was the one he’d committed too often himself, not speaking up. Besides, he liked them, and the company couldn’t afford to lose its two best machine gunners. He was suddenly aware that he was thinking like the company commander. He had 200 Marines to take care of. Everyone could deal with his own conscience. Mellas truly no longer cared about justice or punishment—at least, he no longer cared about the kind the courts stood for. Revenge would heal nothing. Revenge had no past. It only started things. It only created more waste, more loss, and he knew that the waste and loss of this night could never be redeemed. There was no filling the holes of death. The emptiness might be filled up by other things over the years—new friends, children, new tasks—but the holes would remain.

The operation kicked off at 0600 as planned. By 1000 the company was set in and Mellas had three patrols out. Only with the coming of evening and its soft fading light could he finally be alone. He hid behind a blasted stump and he tried to think about meaning. He knew that there could be no meaning to someone who was dead. Meaning came out of living. Meaning could come only from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered. He saw that he alone could make Hawke’s death meaningful by choosing what Hawke had chosen, the company. The things he’d wanted before—power, prestige—now seemed empty, and their pursuit endless. What he did and thought in the present would give him the answer, so he would not look for answers in the past or future. Painful events would always be painful. The dead are dead, forever. Mellas longed to go out on patrol, back to the purity and green vitality of the jungle, where death made sense as part of the ordered cycle in which it occurred, in the dispassionate search for food that involved loss of life in order to sustain life. He thought of the tiger that killed Williams. The jungle and death were the only clean things in the war.

Mellas didn’t sleep that night. He sat on the ground and stared out to the northwest, toward Matterhorn. He watched the mountains subtly change under the shadows of clouds cast by a waning moon as it moved across the sky until the shadows began to fade with the coming of light in the east. He tried to determine if there was meaning in the fact that cloud shadows from moonlight could move across the mountains and yet nothing on the mountain would move or even be affected. 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.