Every year on Memorial Day, the nation pauses to remember and mourn the millions who have lost their lives in the service of our country. This year, the meaning of the day is especially acute. War continues to rage in Iran, where at least 13 American service members have been killed. Many more U.S. soldiers are stationed in countries across the globe.
It is all too easy to take for granted our freedoms as Americans. And it is even easier to misunderstand or ignore the realities of the wars fought to keep those freedoms alive. Free Press contributor Elliot Ackerman understands those realities all too well. A Marine Corps veteran and former intelligence officer, Elliot served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan—before returning home to become, among many other things, a novelist.
“A career filled with night raids, long-distance patrols, and clandestine asset meetings does, at first glance, seem to have little to do with a career spent sitting at a desk day after day dreaming up a story,” Elliot wrote for us last year. But, in fact, as you’ll find in his essay below, the two have everything to do with each other. Today, Elliot marks Memorial Day by reflecting on his relationship with fellow veteran-turned-novelist Karl Marlantes—and on the extraordinary relationship between storytelling and war.
—The Editors
In 1984, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote an essay about the war in Vietnam—more specifically, about the role literature might play in reconciling the country as it reckoned with the war. She interviewed a series of veterans turned authors, including a young Tim O’Brien, who was still six years away from publishing his seminal work, The Things They Carried.
Kakutani noted that several fine works of fiction had emerged from the war, but no masterwork. Perhaps, as Vietnam veteran and author Philip Caputo told her, it was still too early: “Tolstoy wrote about Napoleon’s invasion some 60 years after it happened,” Caputo said, “and it may be that that kind of perspective on Vietnam can come only with the passage of time.”
In the end, Caputo was right: That Vietnam war masterwork wouldn’t come until 2009, when Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, a 600-page epic that took him 35 years to write. Matterhorn is the War and Peace of the Vietnam War. The novel follows a company of Marines as they take and try to hold onto a jungle-covered hill that gave the book its title. Marlantes, who graduated from Yale and dropped out of a Rhodes Scholarship to volunteer in Vietnam, followed Matterhorn with the nonfiction work What It Is Like to Go to War, an equally profound meditation on violence, society, and homecoming.
