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Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War

Karl Marlantes

Last accessed on Thursday June 6, 2019

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Yellow highlight | Page: 324 Note | Page: 324

Something had changed. People he loved were going to die to give meaning and life to what he’d always thought of as meaningless words in a dead language.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 349 Note | Page: 349

His heart, his whole body, was overflowing with an emotion that he could only describe as love.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 350 Note | Page: 350

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.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 351 Note | Page: 351

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.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 355 Note | Page: 355

Mellas forgot about Pollini and ran off toward the sounds. He came upon Amarillo, who was crawling forward, and joined him.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 358 Note | Page: 358

Pollini’s head had been pointing downhill. Could he have shot Pollini when he was firing wildly upward, trying to keep the machine gunners’ heads down? Mellas stared at Pollini’s blank eyes. He sat down beside him, wanting to ask, wanting to explain what he’d done: that he really had wanted to save him, not just add a medal to his list of accomplishments. He had pulled Pollini off mess duty because he wanted to do right by him. He hadn’t meant for him to end up dead. But he could say none of it. Pollini was dead.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 361 Note | Page: 361

The fact that Pollini was dead didn’t make the desire for a medal wrong, did it? What’s fucking wrong with wanting a medal?

Note:Ramos?

Yellow highlight | Page: 367 Note | Page: 367

“You mean he’s afraid the gooks will dee-dee and we’ll be stuck with thirteen dead and forty wounded and only a worthless hill and ten confirmed to show for it,” Mellas said. “There it is,” Fitch said.

Note:Metrics/optics

Yellow highlight | Page: 370 Note | Page: 370

the attack went on—not because of any conscious decision, but because of friendship.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 408 Note | Page: 408

Anger quickened Mulvaney’s pulse. He wanted to tell Hawke how Simpson had ordered the assault without consulting him, how Blakely had pre-briefed the division staff informally, cutting off any chance of countering the order. But Simpson and Blakely reported to Mulvaney. He was responsible. It was the code. “We thought it was a chance to kill some gooks,” Mulvaney said. “That’s our job, Hawke. You knew that when you came aboard.”

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Yellow highlight | Page: 466 Note | Page: 466

All along I know Jesus could maybe be just some fairy tale, and I could be just this one big fool. I choose anyway.” He turned away from his inward images and returned to the blackness of the world around him. “It ain’t no easy thing.”

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Yellow highlight | Page: 486 Note | Page: 486

No trees remained on Matterhorn. The thick bushes that he and Scar had first tumbled into when they arrived were burned away. The entire beautiful hill was shorn, shamed, and empty.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 500 Note | Page: 500

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.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 500 Note | Page: 500

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. Humans were responsible for it all. He laughed at the cosmic joke, but he felt heartsick.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 507 Note | Page: 507

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

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Yellow highlight | Page: 525 Note | Page: 525

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.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 553 Note | Page: 553

The banter about the Bunker got louder and more outrageous. Make the customers throw bits of food to the rats and pop leeches on the tables. Make them fill a hundred sandbags as a cover charge. Make them squat on their haunches or sit on a wet floor. Make them get their water by licking the overhead pipes. Make them piss in the corners. Make them walk back to the parking lot only to find their cars stolen. Soon all five were standing, stamping their feet, and chanting, over and over, “No resupply! No medevacs! No maps!” Finally Hawke sat down. The rest followed. “It’d never work,” Hawke said, taking a drink. “Why not, Jack?” Goodwin asked. “The government would never give us a license to blow up half the customers.” There was a moment’s silence. Then Murphy raised his glass. “Here’s to the Bunker,” he said. His head jerked up toward the raised glass. “And all the customers,” Hawke said.

Note:Metaphor

Yellow highlight | Page: 562 Note | Page: 562

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.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 564 Note | Page: 564

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.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 566 Note | Page: 566

The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.

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Yellow highlight | Page: 566 Note | Page: 566

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.

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