Long before he became the award-winning author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War, Vietnam War veteran Karl Marlantes grew up in a small logging town in Oregon. Young Karl was captivated by books celebrating the U.S. Marines, but even more so by the confident swagger of local athletes who returned from Marine Corps training. They looked stronger, taller, embodying a transformation that made him think, “I don’t know what that is, but I want some of that.” Soon, a conversation with a Marine recruiter sparked dreams of international adventure and service, setting him on a path that would lead to both privilege and profound sacrifice.
As the Vietnam War intensified, Karl found himself studying at Oxford on a scholarship, a position of immense privilege. Yet, a deep sense of duty and patriotism stirred within him, rooted in a time when military service was simply “the Service” – a quiet expectation for young American men. Seeing friends from his small town enlist and sacrifice, Karl felt a profound guilt, realizing he was “hiding behind privilege” while others pulled their oar. This powerful call to serve, to face the challenge and contribute, ultimately led him to make a life-altering decision: to join his fellow Marines on the front lines in Vietnam, a defining chapter in his personal American story.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American Stories. And up next, a story from Karl Marlantes. Karl is the author of the award-winning books Matterhorn and What it Is Like to Go to War. Karl is also a Vietnam War veteran and the recipient of the Navy Cross, our nation’s second-highest award for valor. But in 1967, Karl was far removed from the chaos of battle, in a position of privilege. Here’s Karl to tell the story of why he chose to join the Marines and why he later chose to go to Vietnam.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: It was a series called ‘Landmark Books,’ and I can’t remember. We’ll put it out: one of the big publishers.
00:00:50
Speaker 3: And it was like ‘The Story of Betsy Ross,’
00:00:52
Speaker 2: and ‘The American Flag,’ ‘The Story of Thomas Jefferson,’ and all
00:00:57
Speaker 3: those sorts of things that were written for, you know, ten-year-olds or twelve-year-olds.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: And I remember reading one called ‘The Story of the U.S. Marines,’ and that just fascinated me, you know. But more importantly, it was this thing. I mean, like the guys on the football team—the good athletes, the good runners—when they left high school, they would go down to some mysterious place called San Diego MCRD (Marine Corps Recruiting Depot), and they’d come back, first of all, with suntans, which we never saw where we lived.
00:01:32
Speaker 3: And they would, I swear to God, they looked like they were four inches broader in the shoulder and two inches taller.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: And they would literally swagger up and down the main street of our little town, Seaside, Oregon, which was a logging town, a little town of about 2,500 people. And I’m fifteen, sixteen years old, and I’m just thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know what that is, but I want some of that.’ So I went to the Marine recruiter. And yeah, I’m talking to the Marine recruiter.
00:01:58
Speaker 3: I’m eighteen.
00:01:58
Speaker 2: And I asked, I say to him, I said, ‘You know, I’ve read, you know, books about the Marines, and I’ve seen John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima, and I know what the Marines do.
00:02:07
Speaker 3: They land on beaches and all that sort of stuff. But I said, ‘Do they do anything else?’”
00:02:12
Speaker 2: And he looks at me. He says, ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, ‘we guard all the embassies all over the world.’ I went, ‘Really? Me in Paris?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely.’ And I can swear to God, this is what went through my mind. I went, ‘Well, the odds are you won’t get Paris, but you’ll surely get Madrid or Rome.’
00:02:31
Speaker 1: Sign me up.
00:02:33
Speaker 3: So, it’s a combination of those things. And then there was the draft. It was patriotism.
00:02:40
Speaker 2: I mean, I grew up in a time when, visually, everybody’s dad and uncle was in what they called ‘the Service.’
00:02:47
Speaker 3: We don’t call it that anymore. We call it ‘the military’ today, and…
00:02:50
Speaker 2: I think that that’s an enormously important change in our language. Well, that was when your dad was in ‘the Service’; that was when your uncle was in ‘the Service.’ And there was that sense of, you know, the draft was like the income tax.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: No one likes to pay their taxes.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: Nobody wanted to get drafted, but you sort of felt like you owed your country.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: You know, it’s like, you know, the country won’t…
00:03:16
Speaker 2: operate unless you pay your taxes. We don’t… you know, the roads don’t get fixed unless you pay your taxes. The country isn’t safe unless you… When they drafted, you go and do your bit. That was the feeling at that time, and that was the late 1950s, early 1960s. So, there was that, and there was the fact that, you know, I wonder,
00:03:36
Speaker 3: if I can do it.
00:03:38
Speaker 2: It’s sort of a young man’s, you know, challenge: ‘Could I make it?’
00:03:41
Speaker 3: So, I joined when I was eighteen in a…
00:03:43
Speaker 2: program called PLC, the ‘Platoon Leaders Class.’ It was a classic Marine Corps program. It was like: they didn’t give you any money. You joined as an enlisted in the Reserves, and you went off to Quantico in the summertime. And if you survived what was just the same as boot camp, then you got to go to college, but they didn’t pay you, and you just went back in the summer again. And at the end of that, you got a commission if you graduated from college. I went to Oxford on a scholarship, and in 1967, I thought that that would be, you know, something the Marines wouldn’t let me do because the Marines were really short of junior officers. And they were great. They said, ‘Go ahead, it’s a great honor.’
00:04:31
Speaker 3: I got a Rhodes, and…
00:04:34
Speaker 2: After about six or eight weeks over there, having a wonderful time, I just felt guilty because this little high school I grew up in—six boys died and about seventy served in the Vietnam War, and the high school was about, you know, 400 kids, so 200 boys. I mean, it was pretty amazing. And I just felt guilty. I wasn’t pulling my oar. I wasn’t contributing like they were. They were putting themselves out there, and I was hiding back. And I was always raised never to do that. I mean, that’s just something that you don’t do. You know, if your friends are risking themselves, then you go out there with it with them. And I was choosing not to do that. I was letting them take the risk. And I felt like I used the word, I was hiding behind the privilege.
00:05:30
Speaker 3: Most of the guys I went to high school with, they didn’t even go to college.
00:05:34
Speaker 2: That’s why such a large percentage, um, served in Vietnam, because in those days, the draft was very unfair. You could get out of service if you got a doctor to say that you had a bad knee; or if you, you know, you could say that you were gay; or you could say, you know, any number of things. And the other one was the legitimate one, which for a long time was called the 2-S deferment. If you were in college, they wouldn’t draft you, which is horribly skewed towards the wealthier part of the country.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: But it didn’t make sense to me.
00:06:07
Speaker 2: I mean, it was a war that was just not making sense, that just was looking, you know… what’s the word? Problematical, unethical. I mean, we were getting into, you know, trying to measure the war by how many people we killed. That’s not a moral situation. Killing people in the military is a consequence of trying to get something else done.
00:06:29
Speaker 3: That’s the objective.
00:06:30
Speaker 2: And if people get killed on the way, that is warfare. But an objective of just killing people is, in my opinion, immoral. And we, no, we didn’t have an objective other than, you know, ‘Well, save the South Vietnamese government,’ but that was looking a little dicey because it was clearly a corrupt government. On the other hand, I mean, I could see that the North was a totalitarian government that…
00:06:52
Speaker 3: didn’t look good.
00:06:53
Speaker 2: It was just a mess, and it was a moral mess. And so, you know, you’d say, ‘Well, then you shouldn’t go.’ But I had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and I took my oath seriously. I mean, I swore to God that I would uphold the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States says that the President of the United States is the Commander-in-Chief of the military. Civilian control of the military is absolutely essential. And if the military decides that it doesn’t want to do what the civilians ask it to do, you’ve got…
00:07:35
Speaker 3: a banana republic.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: And so, you can’t have a military where individual people say, ‘I don’t think I’m going to—I don’t agree with the President.’ To uphold the Constitution of the United States, you either have to resign or do what you’re told. But now, all of a sudden, we’re fighting a war, which, you know, the civilians in control decided to put us into. Well, now I’ve got two moral issues, both of which I agree with: which is that the war is wrong. But I’m already in the military, and I swore an oath to do what the Constitution had set up. That was my moral dilemma, and I was very acutely conscious of it. My girlfriend at the time said she’d go to Sweden with me. She didn’t want to go to Algeria. Algeria was taking deserters, and I wouldn’t have been a draft dodger, right? I’d have been a deserter.
00:08:30
Speaker 3: That’s a one step above that.
00:08:32
Speaker 2: So, I have to admit that that’s a little bit scary too. So, you know, that would have hindered me a bit. My friend was just deciding to turn his draft card as a protest, and we spent this really long night. Just like I tell people, I said, ‘I have the feeling that we were sort of hovering over a single candle.’ I know that’s not true, but the feeling of it was: the two of us, just the two of us in this single light, in this dark room, us trying to decide what to do. We’re twenty-three years old—or no, I was… I was twenty-two then, I think—and we’re trying to decide what to do in a terrible dilemma. And believe me, a Rhodes scholarship—there’s nothing that you’d throw away. We didn’t throw them away. We gave them up with a great deal of reluctance. But we made the decision that I’d send my letter into the Marine Corps, I’d go to Vietnam. And he turned his draft card in and got out of England and got to Canada.
00:09:35
Speaker 3: So, he took off.
00:09:36
Speaker 2: I think a couple of days after that decision. And I was, you know, Karl was back in America in the Marine Corps on active duty.
00:09:47
Speaker 3: I admire him greatly.
00:09:49
Speaker 2: Everybody else just sort of hid behind the privilege. A lot of people asked me, ‘How do you feel about the guys that went to Canada?’ I’m going, like, they at least acted, most of them, with honor. So, I think that the issue was being true to your moral position. But it wasn’t easy, and I think, you know, people would like to think that those kinds of decisions are easy. I just felt, ultimately, I just couldn’t stay there hiding and look myself in the mirror.
00:10:19
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production by Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Karl Marlantes for sharing this remarkable story: service versus the military, the difference between the two, honoring your moral code, and how two young men took very different positions. And in the end, well, Karl had respect for both of them. Karl’s story here on Our American Stories.
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