Karl Marlantes on Vietnam

Tell me about A Rumor of War.

Philip Caputo was a marine who later became a very well-known journalist. In my mind it’s one of the first really well-written books that describe the moral ambiguities and difficulties faced by a young marine officer in this particular war. Before that you had World War II when they took Iwo Jima and, OK, there was horrendous fighting, but it was much more clear-cut. Caputo was the first one to describe the terrible ambiguities. He got into trouble over something that happened, I can’t remember what, but he spoke very honestly about the difficult part of trying to be a man leading troops in combat in a difficult war. 

Moral ambiguity sounds like a euphemism for something. Are you talking about atrocities?

No. I think it’s that there wasn’t the clear-cut good versus evil that you had in the Second World War. It wasn’t clear. We were involved in fighting the North Vietnamese, who weren’t nice! They committed terrible atrocities themselves. And we were involved in supporting a government, the South Vietnamese, and they weren’t nice and, obviously, getting thrown into the situation when it’s like – what really is going on here? And, quite frankly for my generation, when we were little boys in the 50s we were raised on the knights in shining armour idea – we’re going to go and defeat evil Nazis. Vietnam didn’t have that. That’s what I meant by the ambiguity. There were no white knights on either side any more. 

That must have been terribly distressing.

It was difficult, yes. But what happens, and I think it’s important to understand that when you commit to something like joining the military these issues are important, but when you’re actually fighting you are no different from World War II soldiers. My own father was in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and my uncles fought in Italy and the Pacific and they all said that we didn’t think once about whooping fascism or anything of the sort. It was just: ‘How do we get out of this alive and help our friends get out of this alive and not let them down?’ It quickly boils down to those around you so there’s a point at which the issue of who’s the white knight disappears.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. 

I like that book because it was his second book about Vietnam. The first one, Going after Cacciato, was very surreal. It was about a patrol looking for Cacciato who was going to Paris, so they followed him to Paris. I don’t know O’Brien but my feeling was that it was an attempt by an author to try and have some artistic expression of what at that time in our history was looking pretty surreal. Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam, it’s a surreal movie set in Vietnam but it could have been World War I. But when O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried he came down to absolute real brass tacks. It was no longer surreal, it was like here’s a list of what a grunt carries, an infantry soldier…

A grunt?

Right. Because they carry so much weight. That’s where the nickname came from because these people carry from 80-120lb on their backs. It’s the same now in Afghanistan and Iraq. There have been enormous technological changes but that infantry soldier on the ground, who actually is the sharp end of the stick, carries a lot of stuff from pictures of girlfriends to ammunition. The Things They Carried is a series of short stories involving those things, things that bring you to reality. 

It can be the most poignant thing about a soldier’s death – a little object that appears to sum them up. 

I think because it snaps you between the two worlds. When you’re in the world of combat it’s a totally different psychic space. I don’t know what else to call it. The first time I lost somebody, one of my guys, I had to go through his pockets to get his personal effects, and in his left breast pocket was a picture of his high school girlfriend. He was just out of high school, of course. And the bullet had gone right through her face. And I just started to tremble… it was so… here’s a high school girl in his pocket with the bullet obliterating her face. It was just so bizarre. And then I had to get an artillery mission organised because they were landing too close to us and quickly you’re back into the… there’s no time to contemplate or mourn. It’s just like: ‘Oh God the shells are coming in…aaaaaargh.’ And you’re back into the other space. That’s why these poignant little bits are so…

The psychic space is interesting. Obviously Vietnam was a long time ago and you’ve just written this book now. What do you do with the space for 30 years?

Well, raise five kids? No, I worked on the book for 30 years. Not out of choice but nobody would publish it or even read it, so I kept saying: ‘Well, I can make it better.’ In some ways it was a two-edged sword. A typical way of dealing with war and trauma is to go to the bar or do drugs and shift jobs every six months. I would go into the basement and work on my novel and I think that was healthy. On the other hand, while I was working on the novel I would get into certain scenes that were very close to things I had witnessed and it would trigger memories and the unconscious and my post-traumatic stress disorder which goes by a thousand names but has been with us since The Odyssey.