RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewChapter after chapter, battle after battle, Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered … Even the book’s infrequent flaws sometimes serve a valuable purpose in its narrative. There is a blizzard of names, ranks and military terms, for instance, and despite the glossary and unit schematic included in the book, I still felt lost much of the time. That confusion, however, was exactly my experience while covering the United States military as a journalist, and in Matterhorn it struck me as annoying but true … Matterhorn is a raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history.
