
Matterhorn
A USA Today Best Book of 2010
An Amazon Best Books of the Year Pick
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2010
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
Winner of the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction
A Time Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year
One of the New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books
Winner of the 2011 Indies Choice Book Award
One of the New Yorker's Best Books of the Year
An incredible publishing story—written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, a New York Times bestseller for sixteen weeks, a National Indie Next, and a USA Today bestseller—Matterhorn has been hailed as a "brilliant account of war" (New York Times Book Review).
Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones' The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
Matterhorn is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war. It is an unforgettable story that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice—a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.
A bonus PDF is included, with maps, a Chain of Command hierarchy, a glossary, and other interesting facts and information.
Praise