Karl Marlantes

Fire Support Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved out of the grey-green mountain jungle. Cold monsoon clouds wreath its mile-high summit, concealing a battery of 105-mm howitzers surrounded by deep bunkers, carefully constructed fields of fire and the 180 marines of Bravo Company. Just three kilometres from Laos and two from North Vietnam, there is no more isolated outpost of America's...

Cold Victory by Karl Marlantes is set in Helsinki, 1947. Finland is precariously balanced between the Soviet Union and the West, and everyone is being watched. At an embassy party, Finnish-American Arnie Koski and Russian Mikhail Bobrov, in a state of intoxication, challenge each other to a friendly — yet clandestine — cross-country ski race. However, the stakes become higher...

In 1968, at the age of 22, Karl Marlantes abandoned his Oxford University scholarship to sign up for active service with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. Pitched into a war that had no defined military objective other than kill ratios and body counts, what he experienced over the next thirteen months in the jungles of South East Asia shook...