What It Is Like to Go to War

Karl Marlantes is a Yale-educated Rhodes Scholar who served as a Marine Corps lieutenant in Vietnam in 1968–69, was awarded the Navy Cross, two Purple Hearts, ten Air Medals, and a list of other decorations, and spent the four decades after the war first in business and then writing. Matterhorn (2010), his Vietnam combat novel, was a substantial literary success and is often paired in syllabi with Klay's Redeployment as the leading American war fiction of the 21st century. What It Is Like to Go to War is the non-fiction companion volume, published by Atlantic Monthly Press (Grove Atlantic) in August 2011. The book did not win major prizes but has had a long syllabus presence in veterans-studies and ethics-of-war courses.

The structure is unusual. The book is not memoir, although the combat material is autobiographical; it is not philosophy, although the reading of Homer, the Mahabharata, Jung, and a range of religious traditions is sustained throughout; it is not clinical, although the chapters on guilt, killing, numbness, and the lying that combat produces are recognisable as clinical material. Marlantes' argument is that combat is a structurally religious and mythopoetic experience for which the modern military and the modern civilian society have no adequate preparatory or reparative practices, and the book is both a reckoning with what that absence cost him personally and a brief for what such practices might look like.

The relation to the formal moral-injury literature is oblique. Marlantes does not use the term moral injury and the book is not citing the clinical literature; the 2011 publication date is two years after Litz et al. and four years before Sherman's Afterwar, but the book is its own thing. It nonetheless reads as recognisably a moral-injury text: chapters on the experience of killing, on the structure of combat-induced numbness, on the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian moral worlds, on the religious and ritual practices that older warrior cultures (Greek, Indian, Native American) used and contemporary U.S. military culture lacks. The book is a veteran-prose articulation of substantively the same arguments Tick makes in War and the Soul from the clinician side, with the difference that Marlantes is the patient and is working out the practices on himself in print.

Atlantic Monthly Press is a serious literary trade press; the editorial filter is literary-trade rather than academic, and the book is written for a general readership. Reviews were strongly positive in The Washington Independent Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and several veteran-studies outlets; Marlantes' earlier military decorations and his subsequent literary success gave the book unusual standing across both military-professional and literary audiences, and it has been used in U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Marine Corps professional reading lists.

The stake is testimonial and pedagogical. Marlantes is openly working out his own moral inheritance from Vietnam in print, and he is also explicitly writing for younger service members and their commanders — the book is partly a textbook on how to think about killing in advance of having to do it, written by a veteran who did not have such a text and believes the absence harmed him. The argument is not against combat as such; Marlantes is not a peace activist and is sympathetic to the necessity of military force in some circumstances. The argument is against the institutional failure to take moral and spiritual preparation seriously alongside tactical preparation.

For the moral-injury corpus What It Is Like to Go to War belongs on the veteran-prose shelf alongside Boudreau (Iraq), Klay (Iraq), and the veteran-testimony chapters of Soul Repair. Read it after Achilles in Vietnam — the Homeric framing is doing related work — and before any of the post-9/11 veteran-prose for the sense of how the construct's vocabulary developed across two generations of veteran writers.