The Fireside Chat Book Club has chosen the book Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes for the July 20 meeting. 

“Marlantes didn’t get to Da Nam ’til ’69 after I was out the second time, but he talks about rotating back to The World and being assigned to the Pentagon,” says Fireside Chat member and Vietnam veteran, Jack Phelps. “One morning, he was directed to deliver some papers to the White House, and as he was walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street were kids, college kids, and they were carrying Viet Cong flags and shouting and protesting. Then, spying Marlantes in his Greens, they started yelling at him, making obscene gestures, and he said all he wanted to do was to talk to them, to tell them that they were his age, but that the Marines he’d left in Da Nam were much younger than they, high-school kids, but real people, too.”

Matterhorn is an epic war novel that took Marlantes thirty years to write. Set in Vietnam in 1969 over the course of three months, it is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant 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. The experience changed them forever.

A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. This is his first novel. He lives in rural Washington State.

Fireside Chat Book Club is open to the public.  For more information about Fireside Chats, contact Marilyn Mattingly at 782-0252 or marilynm@warrenpl.org.