Karl Marlantes

Fire Support Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved out of the grey-green mountain jungle. Cold monsoon clouds wreath its mile-high summit, concealing a battery of 105-mm howitzers surrounded by deep bunkers, carefully constructed fields of fire and the 180 marines of Bravo Company. Just three kilometres from Laos and two from North Vietnam, there is no more isolated outpost of America's increasingly desperate war in Vietnam. Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, 21 years old and just a few days into his 13-month tour, has barely arrived at Matterhorn before Bravo Company is ordered to abandon their mountain and sent deep in-country in pursuit of a North Vietnamese Army unit of unknown size. Beyond the relative safety of the perimeter wire, Mellas will face disease, starvation, leeches, tigers and an almost invisible enemy. Beneath the endless jungle canopy, Bravo Company will confront competing ambitions, duplicitous officers and simmering racial tensions. Behind them, always, Matterhorn. The impregnable mountain fortress they built and then abandoned, without a shot, to the North Vietnamese Army...

Matterhorn

Leonie

"You really do have a temper, don't you?"

"You mean you don't usually show it. [...]"

He tried to stop thinking, but he failed. Now it occurred to him that he’d have to wait for Hawke to rotate home, unless something happened to Hawke. Mellas was amazed and ashamed. He realized that part of him would wish anything, and maybe even do anything, if it meant getting ahead or saving his own skin. He fought that part down.

Environments where questions and learning is seen as weakness sabotage themselves into inferior versions than they could have been. 

A second reason was that Mellas hadn’t been sure if the noise was dangerous, 

and he was far more worried about asking stupid questions than finding out

. Too many stupid comments and dumb questions at this stage could make it more difficult to gain the respect of the platoon, and it was a lot harder to get ahead if the snuffs didn’t like you or thought you were incompetent. 

“I make the fastest cup of coffee in the Corps. This little cup’s been with me ever since I got here. It’s the ever-flowing source of all that’s good and the cure of all ills. [...] 

Mellas had to smile. He took the cup. The coffee was sweet and good.

“Look. Everyone wants a medal. That’s no sin. When I first got here, I wanted one, too. It’s just that after you’ve been out here long enough to see what they cost, they don’t seem so fucking shiny.”

“He spoke in parables. You know why? Because when you speak in parables it’s the listener comes up with the right answer, not what the talker think is the right answer. You with me here?”

It had never occurred to Cortell, until now, that friendship, not just getting along with someone, was possible. It had never occurred to him that friendship was not possible, either.

It occurred to him that if the NVA could hear his wristwatch, they deserved to live. But did they deserve to die if they couldn’t hear it? It was a zero-sum game. One side won only if the other side lost.

“Imagine,” Hawke said. “The first use of the column in the defense. We’ll all get jobs at the Naval War College. We’ll go down in military history.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Mellas said. “Going down.”

Matterhorn quotes

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