Matterhorn

Written by a former Marine officer and set in 1969, the novel deals with a Marine company as it builds, abandons and then painfully retakes a hilltop firebase near the Laotian border. The accounts of combat are extended and unsparing, but the book is about war and its absurdities, less about combat and its terrors. It is especially direct in its treatment of racial tensions and indiscipline in the context of that time and place.