What It Is Like To Go To War / by Karl Marlantes

Marlantes, acclaimed novelist and author of the Vietnam War Epic Matterhorn, delivers another fascinating account of wartime experience. This outing is a far more personalized testament to the nature of military combat. Marlantes' has quite an extensive knowledge about the experiences involved in joining the military, going to war and returning home. The book is more a blend of in-country reporting--transcripts from the author's own field notes are included--accommodated by insider knowledge of the feelings which go through a soldier's mind on the battlefield, the psychology of fight or flight instinct and the simultaneous sense of fear and exhilaration. As much as his own experiences are taken into account, the author delves into other territory. The process of recruitment, obligations involved in commitment to duty, just war theory and the concept of military engagement. A scholar as well, he's equipped to elaborate on the more controversial issues like the economic disparity between those who die fighting and those who live by handing down orders. It's a worthy reflection by an individual more than up to the task of fleshing out the multi-faceted aspects of war and combat. (959.70434092 MARLANTE)

A Prayer For Owen Meany / by John Irving

New England is one of those places where good writers seem to flourish. Not that there aren't other places in the country where literary prowess is concentrated, but the region's seemingly always had an endless supply of talented bards. John Irving is one of them. An Exeter, New Hampshire native where his stepfather and uncle were on the faculty of the local high-profile prep school, Irving grew up never knowing his biological father, an Army Air Corpsmen killed in WWII. After attending Exeter, he went on to the University of Pittsburgh with the hopes of continuing a successful amateur wrestling career but ultimately matriculated back home and the local state university. In the mid-sixties he attended several prestigious writers workshops including the noteworthy University of Iowa gig as well as one in Vienna, a location he would later tab for his first novel. By the 1970's he was writing moderately successful novels and teaching English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. In 1978, The World According to Garp became a bestseller and an international sensation, initiating a decade of success for the writer whose 1980's novels (and one short story) were all either bestsellers or award winners--1985's The Cider House Rules would later net Irving an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. A Prayer For Owen Meany is likely the author's most autobiographical work and though not as wildly popular as 'Garp'--its subject matter is much tamer and more solemn by comparison--is still one of the most widely read books around.

By any standard, Owen Meany is small. It's not just his diminutive stature which distinguishes him from all his peers, or even his fawn-like build and bone structure which projects a alarmingly vulnerable quality. It's his voice. Always a bit of a high pitched squeal several octaves above normal, it's never changed with age, a damaged larynx responsible for the son of a New Hampshire granite mason's conspicuously awkward speech. His size or lack thereof and his quirky, atonal articulations aren't really what sets Owen apart though. It's something else altogether, something especially remarkable. For John Wheelwright, it's not really something about his best friend as something which is him, a fated and fatalistic phenomenon which underlies a particularly critical truth in both their lives. Owen possesses a prescient, almost clairvoyant insight into the future. But it's not so much a psychic power or mystical foreknowledge of things to come as it is an unmistakeable ability to gauge the nature of reality, to foresee a culmination of events based off calculations and intuitions made from an especially brilliant mind. And yet Owen's neither a cold intellectual nor a cynical forecaster of doom. There's a spiritual side to the boy, a very serious spiritual side.

A particularly odd and tragic accident has inadvertently illuminated this fact: the death of John's cherished mother from a foul ball which Owen hit--the only connection the boy ever made with a baseball--during their last little league game. The death is very sad of course. But instead of driving the boys apart, the tragedy actually brings the 12-year-olds closer. After all, Owen loved John's mother as much as John did. The event marks an almost cathartic transformation in Owen who senses a hidden destiny behind the oddly peculiar incident. As the two transition from childhood to adulthood amid a world going from bad to worse in the 1960's, what's already becoming clear to Owen is slowly revealed in tragic and devastating fashion before John's eyes. Although by the time it manifests in full, it just may be too late for John to salvage the life and legacy of his best friend.

Not everyone likes John Irving. Need it be said that he doesn't care for a few of his peers either. His plots are rather atypical and complex, many of them more than a little 'all over the place' with characters demonstrating a propensity towards odd choices and peculiar behaviors. More than a few critics have called his novels Dickensian marking the author's twisting narrative style, quizzical personalities and multiple settings. He writes well though, with a style that's very engaging and accessible to readers. 'Owen Meany' isn't quite as outlandish a plot as 'Garp' or Hotel New Hampshire in which some truly oddball characters cross paths in small town America and Central Europe. John Wheelwright and Owen Meany are relative down to earth types, John a somewhat lazy New Englander descended from founding fathers and Owen an unusually intelligent, especially dynamic product of the working class. That the story is especially grounded in spiritual principles, fervent Protestantism at that, is rather uncharacteristic of Irving. This is after all the same guy who wrote the characters of 'Roberta' Muldoon, the transsexual ex-football star, and radical feminist Jenny Fields into the same story ('Garp'). 'Owen Meany' has nothing so eccentric which may be why it's one of the author's most universally accessible novels. At the same time it's hard to see the story working as well in another's hands. Written by someone else, Owen might come off as something of nerdy outcast or a fledgling sidekick. He's neither of these, really not anywhere close though to call him a hero in a realistic sense wouldn't be too far off. No, the character of Owen is likely one of Irving's greatest achievements, a "small wonder" who's very much the classic visionary as well as an imperturbable charismatic, a cherished friend and magnanimous martyr and, penultimately, every bit a human being. Because of him, the book is a truly captivating work. (FIC IRVING)

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

A first novel which has received considerable acclaim, The Lotus Eaters chronicles the career of Helen Adams, a photojournalist, during the Vietnam War. It reads like the author was there herself - travelling with soldiers in the field, eating food from roadside stands, helping women villagers weed rice paddies, maneuvering her way in a man’s world and in a war torn country.

She is 32 at the war’s end, and has been so caught up in the violence and sense of mission that war imposes on its players, that she is left rootless and unable to move on with her life. The beauty of the book is its vivid account of the mayhem and craziness imposed on a third world country - with wily and resourceful Vietcong against the American boy Marines, who are struggling to figure out how to fight this war.

Helen has two love affairs, one with the award-winning journalist Darrow, who has his own reasons to pursue this dangerous profession, and the second with his Vietnamese assistant Linh, who has lost everything and doesn’t want to be connected to anyone anymore. The book is well plotted, going back and forth in time to give you more nuggets of understanding – of Helen, of Darrow and of Linh.

Some reviewers assert that the book shows how love triumphs over war. In my view, the love is more incidental. What Tatjana Soli cares about, in the end, is Helen: Helen and her odyssey to bear witness, both dreading and fearing death while moving up to meet it.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War / by Karl Marlantes

Not unlike Charlie Sheen's character Chris Taylor in the movie Platoon, Karl Marlantes was a middle-class college graduate when he joined the marines to fight in Vietnam in 1968. The Rhodes Scholar with a degree from Yale began his tour as a Second Lieutenant, enduring some of the fiercest combat action of the entire war while serving as a Platoon Commander. His tenure prompted him to record his experiences in book form, intending the literary effort first as a response to the vigilant anti-war protests he encountered upon his return home. Eventually he re-evaluated his vision towards the formation of a novel. After literally hundreds of rewrites, retouches and rejection letters, Marlantes' Matterhorn, a labor of love over 35 years in the making, is here, inculminating the Vietnam War in all of its horror, tragedy, controversy and legacy.

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In 1969, the Matterhorn is a strategic hilltop in South Vietnam not far from the Demilitarized Zone and only 3 clicks from the border with Laos. It's where some of the most relentless, most ferocious combat of the Vietnam War is being waged, in part by the Marine Corps Company Bravo of the 5th Marine Division led by Platoon Commander 2nd Lt. Waino Mellas. Mellas is 21 and green, having just arrived in country and put in charge of the Bravo One platoon full of scared, ambivalent and often unpredictable grunts, most of whom are still teenagers. In brutal fashion under seemingly mad orders from a dithering, indolent Battalian Commander, the troops of Bravo Company have been ordered to take and hold the Matterhorn against a barrage of counterattacks implemented by the very determined, very unyielding and uniquely skilled North Vietnamese forces.

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Mellas doesn't remain a novice long. No one does in this environment. He and his corp of marines--troops of every race, from all different backgrounds--succeed in taking the hill only to abandon their position when further, likewise inane directives order them elsewhere. All the while, they contend against the might and muck of the jungle where leeches suck them dry, wild animals attack and eat them, their provisions deteriorate, their feet rot and their bodies starve. It is a putrid, ugly and dirty war--literally and figuratively. Dishonor and dissension are commonplace in the ranks where fear, bickering, infighting, self-preservation and emotional paralysis get the better of the men. After all, their circumstances are largely pre-determined, orchestrated above their heads through decisions out of their control.

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Few novels recreate the disaster that was the Vietnam War like Marlantes in this vivid portrait entailing absolutely everything. From the sheer confusion and chaos of combat to the reckless tactics exercised down the chain of command, the book manages both a macro and micro viewpoint of the conflict which accomplished so little at the expense of so much. Literature on Vietnam--fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, etc.--has long weighed down the shelves and no one will question the historical validity, or even the iconoclastic appeal, of the war. Its cultural impact as well as social and political reverberations are well-known just as its personal repercussions are still felt. Yet there are few truly good novels on it, and even fewer great ones. Matterhorn fills that void. It really is a great war novel perhaps destined to become a classic, but a book which won't be soon forgotten never the less. (FIC MARLANTES)

The Wolfman / by Nickolas Pekearo

Not too many novelists are volunteer police officers in their spare time. But that's exactly what Nicholas Pekearo, a budding author already having penned his first novel at 28, was doing when his life was tragically cut short. A member of the NYPD Auxiliary Police Force, Pekearo was working the beat in the very neighborhood where he grew up, Greenwich Village, when he was suddenly gunned down in the street after a botched robbery. His novel, The Wolfman, is narrated by a drifter werewolf who, though a sympathyzing individual, has no choice but to prey on those around him.
 Marlowe Higgins isn't who he pretends to be. He's not even what he pretends to be. A bit of a drifter since his combat days in 'Nam, Higgins currently resides in a sleepy middle-american town (in one of the "fly-over" states) working as a short-order cook by day and spending his nights, at least those under a full moon, mindlessly seeking to devour unsuspecting victims. His condition irreversible (a family blood curse damning him to his situation), Higgins can't help but be consumed with remorse for the countless innocent lives he's claimed--memories and internal characteristics of the slain permanently inhabiting his soul long after the act is perpetrated. In an effort to alleviate his guilt, Higgins secretly acts as an amateur detective tracking vicious crimes that have gone unsolved by the police and consequently targeting the perpetrators of said crimes while in lycan mode, tricking his "inner-wolf" into pursuing the deserving criminals.

Pekearo's skill at making Higgins both believable and sympathetic is a considerable achievement, all the more so considering the novel's crossover appeal. The twist involving the town's police detective Daniel Pearce, Higgins' only real friend, is an extremely clever plot device and Higgins’ gruff, hard-boiled demeanor makes him appealing as both a werewolf and amateur sleuth. Werewolf novels in general are underrepresented in fiction, but books like this present a worthy standard for others to follow. This novel's deceased author had quite a lot of potential. (FIC PEKEARO)

The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction / by Tim O'Brien

Tim O'brien was an Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War. An infantry platoon leader, he was in on his fair share of up-close-and-personal enemy encounters as well as the often contradictory nature of "true" war stories. Among his other books, 'Things They Carried'--though fictional--re-creates the essence of a wartime atmosphere with unequaled clarity.



"A true war story is never moral." (p. 45)

A girl dancing in a bombed out village. Chamber music in the darkest, most isolated jungle. Boredom in the midst of gunfire. Not having the courage to run away from your fear. A man's death caused by his lieutenant's preoccupation with a girl thousands of miles off. Perhaps not the most characteristic depictions of the Vietnam War but "true" all the same. From the pages of this book, it's hard to believe there aren't more political assassinations. The most fervent nationalist angle could never reconcile the idiocy of going off somewhere, not to fight or employ 'diplomacy by other means', but to encounter death at such a level that ". . . you slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in." (p.212). It's not even as if Obrien's world, reconstructed within loosely linked vignettes of personally prevaricated reminisces, carries that much of an 'anti-war' sentiment. The book is more an observational blend of the disturbingly nondescript events which--dreadful as they were--reinvent the commonplace incidents that happen(ed) within a combat atmosphere. (FIC OBRIEN)

RAMBO'S BACK!!! ... in theaters

Original Rambo Trilogy

HEROES NEVER DIE ... THEY JUST RELOAD

First Blood (1982)

Ex-Green Beret John Rambo returns from Vietnam still haunted by the violent, torcherous experiences he's been exposed to. Drifting aimlessly through rural regions in the Pacific Northwest, he seeks connection with the widow of a once brother-in-arms only to be shunned as an outsider and accosted by the local sherriff. The continued harassment soon culminates in a violent altercation leaving one man dead and Rambo on the run. Merely a victim of circumstance, Rambo must nevertheless re-engage his military tactics to thwart his pursuers and survive as a lone wolf against hundreds now trying to track him down.

First Blood Part II (1985)
Shady politics under bureaucratic protection have secretly left several American P.O.W.'s stranded in Vietnam. In an effort to set them free without unnecessary exposure, the feds employ Rambo to infiltrate the enemy and free the captives from their jungle prison. Stylistically, this may be the best flick of the original three placing Rambo in a realistic vigilante role with enough grisly action and subversive attitude to satisfy any attention span. Even the tacked-on love story doesn't seem too overblown as Rambo's roguish loyalty to "the mission" and indifference to protocol give fresh meaning to the word 'mercenary'.

Rambo III (1988)

When lifelong friend and mentor Col. Sam Trautman is taken prisoner in Afghanistan, only Rambo has enough skill, expertise and warrior hutzpah to attempt the rescue mission. But even Rambo must acknowledge the suicidal conditions present: Trautman's prison compound is perched high atop a desert mountain surrounded by soviet troops in a region enduring continual war. The third Rambo features some gruesome carnage sequences akin to films like Death Wish or Bloodsport; and yet manages a worthy tale loaded with trademark shoot-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out explosiveness.