Mr. Marlantes puts you in the heads of scared young men walking blindly in column through head-high grass in terror of trip-wires and ambush by enemies fighting on their home turf, or hacking their way through impenetrable bush overwhelmed by fatigue, junglerot, fear, sickness, tigers and leeches.
Most of the islands that marines had fought over and secured had been jungle horrors, infested by disease and rot, or sun-scorched coral outcroppings, use-less as real estate and, in strategic terms, scarcely worth conquering, much less destroying thousands of American lives to capture.