The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing. Karl Marlantes More Quotes by Karl Marlantes More Quotes From Karl Marlantes War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults. Karl Marlantes war kids dirty When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting. Karl Marlantes veterans-day starting war It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange...and it won't bother humans. Karl Marlantes orange agents hurt Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror. Karl Marlantes wall sorry sex We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case. Karl Marlantes ego survival heart I mean... if you're raised as a decent human being, killing somebody is against every moral thing you've ever been taught. And so, generally, in combat it's 'krauts,' the 'gooks,' the 'yanks' - whatever you want to do to try and make it so that it's not a human being. Karl Marlantes want trying mean Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy. Karl Marlantes military race war We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about 18 where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique. Karl Marlantes zero unique special Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again. Karl Marlantes vietnam metaphor war I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me. Karl Marlantes literature character long I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. Karl Marlantes agents writing years Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow. Karl Marlantes shadow flow steps He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all. Karl Marlantes inner-strength legs men I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy. Karl Marlantes military kids thinking He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares. Karl Marlantes caring evil men Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death. Karl Marlantes touched holy When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet. Karl Marlantes feet writing war The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission. Karl Marlantes before-and-after missions For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. 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. Karl Marlantes divorce dark war How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland. Karl Marlantes mad-at-someone switzerland able
