The troops of Bravo Company suffer the jungle of war, the enemy machine guns, grenades and mortars, and somehow Marlantes transfigures them into heroes with the sometime insight that comes in the face of death. The Marines he leads, mostly teenagers, black troops and white, college boys and country boys, go head to head against the skilled teenage soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. His transformation from novice to veteran over the course of 600 pages forms the core of the novel. He is newly arrived in country, 21 years old, a virgin, with a good mind for map reading and math. Despite a slow, if not stately, opening couple of dozen pages, the author eventually delivers, I promise you, more combat than you may be ready for, most of it seen through the eyes of a fresh new second lieutenant named Mellas. Much to the chagrin of the boys and men in Bravo, a dithering alcoholic battalion commander named Simpson, maneuvering for his own glory, orders them to take that hilltop, dig in, then abandon it, then take it again. The title refers to a hilltop in South Vietnam near the Demilitarized Zone it's also a world - a world of combat, and the threshing ground for the lives and souls of Marine Corps Bravo Company in the midst of the war. "Matterhorn," a Vietnam War novel more than 30 years in the making, comes to us from decorated Marine Corps Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes, who has lived to see his powerful first novel - co-published by Berkeley's El León Literary Arts and New York's Atlantic Monthly Press - find a slot for the third week in a row on The Chronicle and New York Times best-seller lists.
( Atlantic Monthly Press / El León Literary Arts 599 pages $24.95)
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