William Lieth28 June 2012
What It is Like to Go to War
by Karl Marlantes
(Corvus £8.99)
You may not ever read a better book about war than this; it’s up there with Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Why does the Vietnam war produce such superb books? Maybe it’s because of the way its veterans were treated. Marlantes tells you about post-traumatic stress disorder, about what it’s like to kill and about the way the rest of us are in a kind of pathological denial about what our soldiers do. He comes clean: he says war can be exhilarating. There are some very gruesome things here, and some of the best philosophical thinking I’ve ever read in a memoir.
