What It is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes

And yet, in constantly turning from his own thoughts toward those of dead philosophers, Marlantes risks overshadowing the power and emotional impact of his voice. “What It Is Like to Go to War” goes through all this to amplify what is ultimately a simple plea: The veterans’ code of silence must be broken. He quotes Nietzsche’s fatalism: “I am by nature warlike.

He musters an army of philosophers, historians, and religious texts with which to attack (and deconstruct) the war experience. It may be an equally impossible task, but Marlantes attempts it with deliberate dissection: Each chapter is titled after behaviors endemic to the war experience – Killing, Loyalty, Heroism – and emotions like Guilt or the lack thereof, and Numbness. What he has replicated isn’t war, but rather the constant mental churning that follows and a quest to recover from man’s impulses in deadly situations.

But this new book is less a memoir than an intellectual analysis in which Marlantes grapples with the complex and disconcerting moral questions involved in fighting and killing. Some scenes are nearly identical to those in Marlantes’s bestselling novel, “ Matterhorn,” and like the novel, “What It Is Like” spares no detail about exhaustion, or excrement, or jungle rot. True, this book describes the chaos of combat, with beautifully conjured landscapes and riveting battle sequences. “What It Is Like to Go to War” is really more about What It Is Like to Have Gone to War. In calling his new book What It Is Like to Go to War, hasn’t Marlantes promised the impossible? Karl Marlantes, a Marine lieutenant and platoon leader in Vietnam, is equally well aware that combat cannot be bound between two covers. War movies and battle memoirs will never replicate the firsthand horror and exhilaration of battle. Ask most combat veterans what war is like and they’ll tell you – if they agree to talk about it at all – that you can’t know war unless you’ve been there.

What It is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes