Ty Hawkins Vietnam and Verisimilitude: Rethinking the Relationship between “Postmodern War” and Naturalism I n 2010, Atlantic Monthly Press, a well-respected imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc., released Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War . 1 he text, authored by Marine Corps combat veteran Karl Marlantes, is a wonderful prospect for inclusion into the canon of traditional American war literature. By “traditional American war literature,” I mean the school of representing war for which Stephen Crane’s he Red Badge of Courage (1895) is the model text and for which the use of naturalist aesthetics becomes a means of bridging the gap between those who have experienced the horror of industrialized combat and those who have not. Fredric Jameson approvingly refers to such texts as those invested in conveying war’s “sense datum,” which is to say texts striving to produce a simulacrum of “the existential experience of war” (“War” 1534). 2 According to Marlantes, this is exactly the project he undertook in crating Matterhorn, a thirty-ive-year-long process that saw him revising his novel repeatedly, while collecting a stream of rejection letters. In January 2010, Marlantes wrote in Publishers Weekly that the Vietnam War opened a “chasm” in American culture that he hoped his iction could “bridge” in some way. Marlantes states,