1944
Karl Marlantes
in Moral injury
American novelist and essayist, Vietnam veteran (Marine Corps lieutenant, 1968–69), much-decorated combat infantry officer (Navy Cross, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, ten Air Medals, among others). Yale BA, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (read PPE), long business career between the war and his late-career literary work. Matterhorn (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010), the Vietnam combat novel he had been writing for thirty years, is the principal literary work; What It Is Like to Go to War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011) is the non-fiction companion.
Stake§
Marlantes writes from the doubled position of decorated combat veteran and unusually-credentialed civilian (Yale and Oxford, three decades of business success), and the stake is the long-deferred working-through of his own combat experience in print. The argument is openly didactic: that the contemporary U.S. military and the contemporary civilian society fail to prepare combatants for the moral and spiritual stresses of war, and that the failure is structural and reproduces itself across generations of veterans.
Marlantes is the principal Vietnam-vet literary voice in contemporary moral-injury reading, alongside the earlier and more directly clinical work of Shay and the prior literary work of Tim O'Brien. Matterhorn (2010) is the combat novel and is widely taught in war-literature courses; What It Is Like to Go to War (2011) is the non-fiction articulation of substantively the same arguments Tick makes from the clinical side and Shay makes from the Homeric-clinical side, written from the patient-perspective rather than the clinician-perspective.
The book is closer to the Tick / Brock mythopoetic / pastoral register of the field than to the Litz clinical-research register. Marlantes does not use the term moral injury and the book is not in dialogue with the academic literature; it is a veteran's reading of Homer, the Mahabharata, Jung, and a range of religious traditions, structured around an argument about what combat is and what would be needed to prepare combatants for it. For the moral-injury corpus he sits on the veteran-prose shelf alongside Boudreau (Iraq) and Klay (Iraq), with the difference that Marlantes is the prior-generation voice and is doing more explicitly mythopoetic work.