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Karl Marlantes: What It Is Like to Go to War

As a young lieutenant, fresh out of college, he had mere moments to figure out how to lead men through life or death situations in the highland jungle of Vietnam. As a veteran, he has had more than four decades to figure out how to describe that experience.

Karl Marlantes received the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals for his service with the Marine Corps in Vietnam. In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes describes the reality behind those awards — the sense of being overwhelmed and inexperienced while lives were at stake, the frustration of dealing with a distant and seemingly disinterested command structure, and the shock of arriving home mere hours after leaving the battlefield. His own story serves as a launching point for a wide-ranging meditation on the psyche of the soldier and the experience of being at war, from ancient history to the present. How does the experience of combat affect a human being? How should a nation prepare its warriors, and how it should receive them when they return?

Karl Marlantes is also the author of Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, which won numerous prizes, including the William E. Colby Award given by the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the 2011 Indies' Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction. A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he lives in rural Washington.