The Matterhorn

Matterhorn

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, 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. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever. Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.

The Matterhorn

On 14th July 1865, two competing rope teams made their way to the summit of the Matterhorn. The mountain was considered invincible until Italians and Britons had the iron will to climb the colossus in the middle of the 19th century. The team around the British alpinist Edward Whymper won the race. It was sensational that for the first time people boarded the Matterhorn for good. But his rough aura was to take revenge: when the men de-scended the mountain, four of the seven climbers fell into the abyss, which is why the first ascent heralded the end of the Golden Age of Alpinism. What exactly happened in the crash? This commemorative volume keeps the memory alive.

The Valley of Zermatt and the Matterhorn