A war hero returns home, 40 years later

Karl Marlantes stared at the young man through the sights of an M-16 rifle and slid his muddy finger over the curve of the trigger.

Turning toward him, the man locked eyes with Marlantes and froze.

“Don’t throw it. Don’t throw it,” Marlantes whispered, hoping the man would surrender.

Moments earlier, the North Vietnamese soldier had been hurling grenades at a group of U.S. Marines. He was cornered near the top of a hill. Blood streamed down his face from a head wound; the crumpled body of a friend lay at his feet.

Marlantes had slithered undetected to a spot just below the soldier’s foxhole. When the soldier popped up, arm cocked to throw another grenade, he spotted Marlantes.

The soldier’s dark eyes widened in fear; he looked around for a way out, but there was none; and then he snarled, showing his teeth.

Marlantes watched as the grenade left the soldier’s hand and tumbled straight toward him.

‘How can you return home?’

He had a family, a big income, and stayed in first-class hotels while jetting off to Europe and the Far East. When companies faced a crisis, they called Marlantes. He was the Ivy-League educated business consultant, the ex-Marine with the medals.

Yet few knew that Marlantes was facing his own crisis. Something was happening to him that neither he, nor his wife or five kids, could understand: There was hardly a day when he wasn’t thinking about the secrets he left in Vietnam.

“How can you return home if you’ve never left?” he once wrote.

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Marlantes is 67 now, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, a scruffy goatee and a calm, measured way of talking, but the fatigue can be seen in the lines under his eyes. He’s been sorting through his war memories for over 40 years.

He first tried to purge them. He took 33 years to write “Matterhorn,” his 2010 debut novel about a Marine unit in Vietnam. He released his combat memoir, “What It is Like to Go to War,” last year.

Both books have been hailed as war classics. “Matterhorn” became a New York Times bestseller. Critics described his memoir as “spellbinding” and “staggeringly beautiful.” Marlantes was invited to speak at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy.

Marlantes accepted so many speaking requests that a three-week stretch is the longest he’s spent at home during the last two years. But Marlantes’ books aren’t just memoirs. They’re warnings.

What Marlantes faced may soon afflict the families and friends of thousands of American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The nation is facing a post-traumatic stress disorder “epidemic,” a recent U.S. Army study concluded.

The study says that about 472,000 Afghan and Iraq veterans are suffering from PTSD, which includes symptoms such as inexplicable bursts of anger, depression, and memory loss. The U.S. Army sergeant recently arrested for allegedly gunning down 16 Afghan villagers, including women and babies, had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and PTSD. He was on his fourth deployment. Veterans carry invisible wounds, Marlantes says, but so do their loved ones.

“For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too,” he writes near the beginning of his memoir. “For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.”

Those clouds of war can take a decade to engulf a veteran. Marlantes didn’t have his first flashback until about 15 years after he left Vietnam, when he walked into a business meeting one day and saw a pile of mangled bodies on the conference table.

“When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn’t over for the veterans, or the family,” he says. “It’s just starting.”

Families can prepare for that burden, he says, but they must first understand some uncomfortable truths: War isn’t just hell. It can also be exhilarating.

‘He was the real deal’

The exhilaration springs, in part, from a taste of power. Soldiers as young as 18 are handed the power to dispense life or death, a role normally reserved for God, Marlantes says.

He felt the rush of that kind of power in combat, and it thrilled – and terrified – him.

He writes in his memoir:

“The next time you’re with a group of around 40 people, perhaps at a meeting … imagine them all with the lean hard bodies of 18- to 20-year-old men. Arm them all with automatic rifles, rockets and grenades. Add three machine guns and a supply of bullets backed by the industrial might of America. Understand that these armed young men will do, without question, absolutely anything that you ask … and no one will ever ask a single question.”

Marlantes didn’t have to go to Vietnam.. He was a go-getter: a piano prodigy who appeared on local radio shows (his mother was a waitress who saved her tips to buy him a piano), a high school football star and a National Merit Scholar. He graduated from Yale University in 1967, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England. He says he enlisted because he didn’t want to hide behind his privilege while men his age were dying Vietnam.

He’d grown up in Seaside, Oregon, a small, coastal town of loggers and fishermen and members of what Marlantes calls “The Club,” the fraternity of men who had gone to war.

His father was a high school teacher who fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Marlantes’ uncle faced the Japanese during the same war. And his Scoutmaster told campfire stories about landing in Normandy during D-Day.

Vietnam, which he now views as a mistake, was already unpopular, but he wanted to do his duty.

“I’m not a fence-sitter,” he says. “I had to act.”

He went to war in 1968 as a skinny, 23-year-old second lieutenant. He led a platoon of Marines who patrolled so long behind enemy lines that they were routinely infested with ringworm and jungle rot.

“The first thing he did when he got there was to gather all the squad leaders together and say, ‘I don’t have a clue about how this works. You guys do. You keep me alive, and I’m going to do my best to keep you alive,’ ” says Tim Rabbitt, a fellow lieutenant in Marlantes’ unit.

Marlantes learned how to lead. He would win the Navy Cross, the Marine Corps’ second highest decoration for valor, the Bronze Star, two Naval Commendation Medals for valor and two Purple Hearts.

“He really cared about his men and he took care of his men,” Rabbitt says. He was the real deal.”

Marlantes spent a year in combat. One of his closest calls came when he encountered the North Vietnamese soldier trapped on the hill.

The battle took place on a river near the border of North and South Vietnam. Marlantes’ platoon has just broken through a series of bunkers. Soldiers rarely see the enemy in combat; Marlantes, startled to lock eyes with the man, hesitated.

That pause almost cost him his life. When the trapped soldier threw the grenade, it bounced past him, tumbling down a hill before exploding.

Marlantes pulled the trigger. His first shot missed, but he quickly followed up with three shots, striking the man in the chest. His feeling at the time: relief and “savage joy.”

“I churned up the slope to take the next position and quickly forgot even that feeling,” he wrote in his memoir.

That soldier, though, wouldn’t let Marlantes forget.

‘He just fell apart’

When Marlantes was discharged from the Marines in 1972, he returned home and hid. Most Vietnam vets did. They treated the war as a shameful secret – not to be talked about. Marlantes stuffed his medals into a jelly jar in his basement.

He tried to forge a normal life: He married, started a family and a career. At first, he excelled in corporate America, just as he had on the battlefield. He became an international consultant and spent 20 years advising oil, coal and electrical companies.

Consulting with corporations wasn’t the same as leading a group of soldiers through the jungle, but the job provided some adrenalin-rush. Marlantes was often called in during a crisis – a company was ready to implode, or it had to restructure to survive. While everyone else was exhausted and panicked, Marlantes was having fun.

He could tell when a company was in trouble, but he couldn’t see that he needed help.

When his wife became pregnant with their first son, Marlantes didn’t want the birth to take place in a hospital. A midwife delivered the baby in a cabin in the woods. Marlantes also kept his son’s name off of a birth certificate for six months. He didn’t want Peter to be eligible for the draft.

“I was so angry at the government,” Marlantes says. “I didn’t want my child to be subject to the government like I was. I was a little bit out of my mind.”

At times, Marlantes treated his family like his Marine platoon – they were always on the go, moving from one adventure to another.

His daughter, Laurel, says her family lived in a house boat in India; a tent on an army base in the Himalayas; a meadow in England; a sky rise hotel in Singapore, and a vineyard in France. She says it was fun and “chaotic.”

“There was this need to keep his adrenalin high,” says Laurel, now an actress and interior decorator in Los Angeles. “I’d gone to 15 different schools by high school.”

Marlantes trained his children as if they were his troops. He taught his son how to shoot, gave him martial arts lessons, and showed him how to survive in the woods. He taught his daughter “safe words” that she could repeat over the phone to signal that she had been abducted.

Taken individually, each lesson might simply be counted as good parenting. But the cumulative effect of always preparing for the worst filled Laurel with fear. “Even when we went to the supermarket, it seemed like we were gearing up for war.”

But it wasn’t war, and that was a problem. He missed the intensity and the friendships. Everything else seemed so bland. He felt numb much of the time, and dabbled in drugs. Once he even thought about running drugs to South America with an old Vietnam buddy, just for the hell of it.