In fairness, I didn't really choose to read this book now, I decided to read it along with my daughter, for whom it fulfilled a summer reading requirement.

Part of my less than stellar reaction I think has to do with the fact that I have read an awful lot of Vietnam books in the last few years. And so at the risk of sounding cynical, this book sort of felt like more of the same - incompetent officers, tons of swearing, whorehouses, gallows humor, lots of drinking...

If I try to step back and look at this book objectively, especially considering it was written when the war was very much still a raw memory for our country, I can see how important and ground-breaking and revelatory and -- to cite a central theme of the book -- courageous.

I love buying and reading these types of books.
Boats, yachts, historical events and books about the sea are generally excellent. If there are sequels in your series, I would love to read them.

The beauties of owning the books of important authors cannot be discussed. I'm looking forward to your new books.

For friends who want to read this book, I leave the importance of reading a book here. I wish good luck to the sellers and customers...

Top 10 benefits of reading for all ages:

1. Reading Exercises the Brain

As we read, we need to remember the different characters and settings of a particular story. Even if you enjoy reading a book in one sitting, you need to remember the details during the time you devote to reading the book. Therefore, reading is an exercise for your brain that improves memory function.

2. Reading Is a (free) Form of Entertainment

Did you know that most of the popular TV series and movies are based on books? So why not indulge in the original form of entertainment by immersing yourself in reading? Most importantly, it's free with your Markham Public Library card.

3. Reading Improves Concentration and Focus

We all agree that there can be no reading without focus, and we need to concentrate on every page we read to fully understand the story. In a world where gadgets only speed up and shorten our attention span, we must constantly practice concentration and focus. Reading is one of the few activities that requires your undivided attention, so it improves your ability to concentrate.

4. Reading Improves Literacy

Have you ever read a book where you come across a word you don't know? Books have the power to improve your vocabulary by introducing you to new words. The more you read, the more your vocabulary will improve as well as your ability to communicate effectively. Also, reading improves writing skills by helping the reader understand and learn different writing styles.

5. Reading Improves Sleep

By creating a bedtime routine that includes reading, you can signal to your body that it's time to sleep. Now more than ever, we rely on increased screen time to get through the day. That's why you put your phone away and pick up a book and tell your brain it's time to calm down. Also, since reading helps you relieve stress, reading right before bed helps calm your mind and anxiety and improve your sleep quality.

6. Reading Increases General Knowledge

Books are always full of fun and interesting facts. Whether we read fiction or non-fiction, books have the ability to provide us with information we might not otherwise know. Reading various topics can make you a more knowledgeable person and therefore improve your speaking skills.

7. Reading Is Motivating

By reading books about heroes overcoming adversity, we are often encouraged to do the same. Whether it's a romance novel or a self-help book, the right book can motivate you to never give up and stay positive.

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Tim O'Brien was until very recently a complete unknown to me. On the back of the first few chapters in this masterpiece, I have ordered not far off his entire collection of works. Guy can write!

Tim O’Brien is the only author writing about the Vietnam War that I have read. While that prevents me from drawing comparisons with other authors writing on the same topic, I’m willing to wager that O’Brien sets a respectably high standard. If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is a gritty, no-holds-barred exposé of the horrors and brutality of war, what it does to people, how it changes them irrevocably.

O’Brien wrote part of this book during his term in Vietnam, so the authenticity of his sentiments and the words he chooses ring true. It was therapy for him at the time, for he wrote “in the last hour of light, after we had dug our foxholes and set out the trip flares.” The act of writing enabled a sanity checkpoint in wildly shifting priorities and circumstances. O’Brien said he felt calmed and restored…he “became human again.”

The theme running through the book is a meditation on courage: what it means personally to the individual, how it is talked about, what it means to know you have it—or lack it. O’Brien is as comfortable drawing from the experiences of being bullied in the eighth grade as he is quoting from Plato’s dialogues on the topic. Living through the Vietnam War seems to define courage in different ways: it is hunting a hidden enemy, sometimes hiding in plain sight blending with civilians; it is keeping one’s head down in a foxhole as bullets and shells tear through the air inches from one’s head.

Courage is also withstanding the psychological ravages of the mind when, for example, navigating a mine field. O’Brien says, “The moment-by-moment, step-by-step decision-making preys on your mind. The effect is sometimes paralysis.” O’Brien felt the war was wrong with enough conviction that he plotted “desertion” even while in infantry training. He went as far as conducting meticulous research for escape to Sweden, hoodwinking parents, friends, and commanders, but ended by burning his plans in mid-desertion because “I simply couldn’t bring myself to flee.” Perhaps this was his brand of courage—fighting a war that he didn’t believe in.

There is graphic violence and death in this book in all its ugly, grotesque, unfair forms—men, women, children, and supremely neutral livestock. Yet in the midst of the chaos of war, almost with serene obscenity, O’Brien observes a brilliant, starry night, a defiantly stunning sunrise, idyllic swimming in the sea, and random acts of human kindness.

If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is all the more gripping because O’Brien is a talented writer. Certainly, he gets personal, but it is, after all, a memoir. Though he writes with restraint, readers will still sense that O’Brien is desperately trying to tell us something about a luminous, yet perplexing truth: man’s pathetic inability to resolve differences without having to go to war over them.

O'Brien's remembrances of the terror, heat and boredom of the Vietnam War are incredibly real to the reader. It doesn't quite rise to the brilliance of the The Things They Carried which has the benefit of fiction and multiple perspectives, but this memoir is very powerful. I especially found his description of his inner conflict in the days during the summer leading up to his deployment fascinating to witness. And his depictions of other soldiers and commanders are quite funny between terrible scenes of war. Highly recommended.

His first book right? War wasn’t even over. Seems he really needed to get this off his chest. On the adequately dubbed Mad Mark’s chest, you’d find the necklace of dead Vietcong ears, literally. Read it for more painfully detailed descriptions of gore. Rape too. Less detailed, thankfully.
No but it’s really not about that. It’s about courage, or wise endurance, wrestling with desertion. It’s about the military sense of humor (which includes fake ambushes on April fool’s day) and landmines (do you know the difference in between a Toe-popper and a Bouncing Betty? There’s a fun typology that can help you with that in the best titled chapter for such a topic, ‘step lightly’.), and about dilemmas (this path hasn’t had any mines so far. “Therefore we should stay on it!” “Therefore we should leave it!”). Trapped! Yet, how the war is missed once stateside. Quick, beautiful read in which the literary fat has been trimmed.

3.5*

Didn't sit well.

The author despises the Vietnam War, which of course is easy to do. Despite the sparsely interspersed philosophizing, no serious arguments are made, only questions raised. The author has a position that he takes for granted is right and it's good enough for him. It is not a bad read, but the lack of clarity left me cold, and the rant towards the end coming from "Callicles" surely was a mean spirited caricature. Despite a few high points, I was ultimately disappointed.

I really wanted to love this, because I love Tim O'Brien generally. But, I came away from this feeling like I had just listened to a bunch of random war stories about Vietnam and going to Vietnam, which I know was the point of the book. I guess it made it feel a bit cliched - at this point, we've heard all this before, but it was probably more shocking or new at the time it was written. I also think he took the whole idea of storytelling much further with "The Things They Carried." Those were also many random vignettes, but they added up to the common theme of the exploration of what the word "truth" means. For me, this book didn't add up to much. Also the narrator had a really annoying Eeyore voice, so that didn't help.

I checked this book out from my school library because I thought it looked interesting. It was interesting to hear about the Vietnam war from the perspective of a person who was in the war. Overall I enjoyed the book

Since I am finally viewing the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary I have dreaded seeing, I decided to listen to this memoir O'Brien began writing in Nam thru his journal and letters. He actually published pieces of it soon after he returned to Minnesota. Like me, O'Brien read deeply into the war and took a principled stance against it, but unlike me he actually went, citing cowardice as his main reason for finally agreeing to go. In his story he is almost matter of fact about the horrors these young men experience, and as he says in an interview, forty years later he is stilling dealing with the trauma of watching his friends lose body parts or get blown to bits over a war he knew even as a young man was based on misjudgments and lies. And lies to cover the lies: Johnson, McNamara, Westmoreland, even Kennedy, just extending the colonialist impulses of the French in that country.

And the racism, misogyny, the ignorance and arrogance fostered by military leaders in these young men who just wanted to either 1) kill as many of the "enemy" as possible, not knowing why they were even the enemy besides being Communist, and 2) just wanting to go home. Most of them 18 and 19.

At one point he suggests that maybe the thing we might learn from that war is to allow no more Liars as leaders, but the lies of Iraq, the daily lies now, a young man's optimism. I liked the debate O'Brien has with a hawk chaplain justifying My Lai, where women and children and the elderly were slaughtered.

I like how greater books emerged out of this like the incomparable The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato (that escape fantasy was there in Combat Zone) and the My Lai madness novel In the Lake of the Woods that almost drove him to suicide, that book began in a sense while he was already there.

While Ken Burns is no radical, we can see the deep and howlingly mad critique of O'Brien, one of the consultants on the series, throughout the film series. Already in the first episode I cried 3-4 times, thinking of my cousin Berg killed there and so many young men-just boys, really, a children's campaign, as are most wars--who died there senselessly. Domino theory, indeed. A portrait in courage.

Not much to say about, it was okay, nothing special for me. Didn't really have any outstanding moments for me. Published in 1973 so I'm no way saying that it wasn't the first, but felt really "seen this before". I liked O'Brien's The Things They Carried more.