Karl Marlantes was studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship when he began to feel the pull of something he couldn’t ignore. Back home in Seaside, Oregon, the boys he’d grown up with were being drafted into Vietnam. Some were already serving. A few had been killed. Most had never had the option to leave, let alone study abroad. And the longer Marlantes stayed in England, the more it felt like he was hiding behind something they never had.
He didn’t believe in the war. He questioned the strategy, the leadership, and the way the burden seemed to fall on the same kinds of people, over and over again. But he had taken an oath when he joined the Marines, and he’d been raised to believe that if people you cared about were stepping up, you didn’t sit it out just because you could. That belief, more than politics or duty, pulled him back. He left Oxford, rejoined the Marines, and went.
That decision never stopped shaping him. Years later, he would write Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War, two of the most respected books on Vietnam and its aftermath. But long before that, he was a 22-year-old trying to figure out what loyalty looked like in a war he didn’t believe in.
[Photo Credit: George Wilkerson]