By ELIZABETH D. SAMET
A soldier comes home from war. His wife's welcome is extravagant, fit for a god. Refusing to let his feet touch the ground, she unrolls a new carpet, plush and crimson. She tells him he is "like the sun," bringing "warmth in winter," and predicts that he will again be "master . . . of his house, fulfilled." Then the man takes a bath, an act of literal and symbolic cleansing after a long journey and an even longer, deeply compromising war. And there he dies, stabbed by his wife, in bath water polluted by his own blood.
Illustration by Javier Jaén
WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR
By Karl Marlantes
This, of course, is the story of Agamemnon, murdered by Clytemnestra on his return from the Trojan War. It is one of antiquity's essential parables of betrayal, a warrior's fantasy turned nightmare, dramatized by Aeschylus (here in Robert Fagles's translation) and found much earlier in Homer's "Odyssey," where it serves as a warning to Odysseus: Don't go home. If you must, wear a disguise and trust no one.
Veterans can feel themselves double-crossed in so many different ways — as much by their own wartime experience as by a nation's failure to reincorporate them — that their betrayal proves an almost inexhaustible subject. It textures Karl Marlantes's war novel "Matterhorn," published last year, and provides the mournful keynote to his new nonfiction book, "What It Is Like to Go to War."
For Marlantes it isn't a bath but the lack of one that becomes the symbol of betrayal. Just returned from Vietnam, the Marine lieutenant goes home with Maree Ann, a former girlfriend who meets him at the airport. Marlantes initially thinks he needs sex, but the worry that he still has a venereal disease contracted from an Okinawa prostitute, together with a more general feeling of contamination and estrangement, makes him change his mind.
In retrospect, he declares, what he really needed was a bath — he needed "Maree Ann to sit down with me in a tub of water and run her hands over my body and squeeze out the wrong feelings and confusion, soothe the pain, inside and out. . . . I needed her to dry the tears, and laugh with me, and cry with me. . . . I needed a woman to get me back on the earth, get me down in the water, get me down under the water, get my body to feel again, . . . to come again into her world, the world that I'd left, and which sometimes I think I've never returned to."
That's a lot of need, and with every page it becomes increasingly clear that no one can ever wholly satisfy it. The anguish, nervous energy and unfulfilled hunger to be healed in this passage are representative. So, too, is the folkloric vision of women as midwives to the warrior's rebirth, incongruously offered to readers who live in a world where a returning warrior might well be a woman herself. Gender is vital to Marlantes's understanding of the warrior's place in society. His ideas, which owe something to Jungian archetypes, are idiosyncratic, while his meditations on the supposed imperilment of conventional masculinity — part of what he sees as a general decline of social rituals that ostensibly once eased the warrior's repatriation — evoke at times the stridency of Harvey Mansfield's "Manliness" and more often the nostalgic mysticism of Robert Bly.
Working to illuminate the spirituality of war, "the temple of Mars," Marlantes devotes individual chapters to a constellation of related ideas including killing, guilt, lying, loyalty, heroism and homecoming. Along the way he cites an eclectic library of consolation: Homer, the "Mahabharata," Native American rituals, medieval sagas.
He also includes illustrative vignettes that will be familiar to readers of "Matterhorn," the signal difference being that instead of happening to the fictional Lieutenant Mellas they now befall the actual Lieutenant Marlantes. The story most important to understanding the psychological pain animating both books is the one in which Marlantes is left to wonder whether he accidentally killed a Marine he attempted to rescue in his hunt for a medal. Nowhere does Marlantes explain the significance of fictionalizing an autobiographical event, then returning it to the world of nonfiction.
"This book is my song," the author declares toward its close, the culmination of a tormented, 40-year struggle to come home and to find forgiveness. In a revealing moment, Marlantes recounts a meeting with the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who assumes the role of father confessor: "Did you intend right?" Campbell asked, and when Marlantes nodded, he "dismissed my problem with a wave of his hand. Absolution." Absolution is an intensely private matter. No reader can judge its success. The entire book, which Marlantes explains he wrote "primarily to come to terms with my own experience of combat," resides at the same deeply personal level.
Yet he also acknowledges a set of laudable, impassioned public ambitions: to help other struggling veterans; to enlighten "citizens and policy makers" about the consequences of waging war; to provide "young people" who might join the military "a psychological and spiritual combat prophylactic, for indeed combat is like unsafe sex in that it's a major thrill with possible horrible consequences." The analogy isn't subtle — it isn't meant to be — and its facility and sensationalism are symptomatic of the book's prevailing emotionalism, which too often stands in the way of sustained social critique and of the patient moral and political analysis required to unravel the convoluted network of courage, shame, honor, obligation and betrayal that war entails.
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