What can I say - I read this book in a single day, loving how the author so easily transitioned from first person to second without breaking stride. His writing is hard to describe without seeming insincere and the story is both beautiful and horrible in the same breath. In the end, I feel more capable of understanding without ever finding true understanding of my husband's time in a combat zone. The conflict of the soul, the desire to be something without understanding how, the need to live, the guilt that he did. I get the feeling I'll mull these pages over for a long time.

Tim O'Brien is always haunting. Though I didn't love this quite as much as "The Things They Carried" (the ultimate Vietnam book IMO), or my all time love "In the Lake of the Woods" (words can't express the adoration I have for that chaotic beautiful mess), If I Die in a Combat Zone is disturbing and painful and written with the clarity and disdain the subject matter deserved.

Though an interesting read, I did not find it as enjoyable or insightful as 'The Things They Carried'.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later ...

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor" ..

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

- from Ezra Pound's, 'Hugh Selwyn MauberAnnotateley (Part One) Life and Contacts'

I have a younger brother who served in Afghanistan and an older brother who served multiple times in Iraq and Afghanistan. War memoirs are important to me. They give me some peek, some window to the full burden I carry as the brother who didn't see combat and wasn't changed forever during or killed after a war that was impossible to fully justify as a soldier. Only one percent of us (in the US) serve. And only a small fraction of the military serves on the tip of the spear. So, we need help. We need good writers who have served to comeback and give us a peek at the ugly cost we don't feel, to expose us to the loss that we can never really understand, to give us a moment's exposure to the weight we left for others.

Anyway, O'Brien (one of the best known writers seasoned by the Vietnam war) wrote a solid war memoir. Things I liked: the cover, Plato, Eric as mirror, dialogue, etc. Things I didn't: O'Brien didn't add much to the combat veteran memoir, repetitious, risk-free, light. Sure it was updated with the particular nuances of the Vietnam experience, but it was rather safe (a bizarre thing to say about a memoir of a combat vet).

Don't get me wrong. I liked it. I appreciated it, and will read more of Tim O'Brien. I just didn't think this was on par with Robert Graves, Michael Herr, Guy Sayer, Artyom Borovik, Bob Kotlowitz, etc. Good but just not great. I say this realizing I'm reading this 40+ years after it was first published. I allow that I may think the book is safe only because the road of Vietnam war memoirs was built with a helluva lot of O'Brien's own bricks and blood.
___________________

Whoever gave Tim O'Brien a publishing deal should be ashamed of their selves. As a result of publishing, humanity has been exposed to the most disgusting writing skills known to man. The world is a darker place for seeing any O'Brien novels.

Outstanding attempt to portray the experience of an infantry soldier draftee in the Vietnam War. Although it is a memoir, it is so carefully crafted in its sequencing of vignettes and selection of archetypical examples, it comes across as a fictional narrative. Nevertheless, it is compelling, simultaneously tragic and beautiful. It feels honest about the numbness and ambivalence of most soldiers fighting an unwinnable war, one in which the enemy was rarely seen and blended in so well with the civilian population.

O'Brien shows great talent in alternating between examining his own personal feelings and modes of survival with coverage of the actions of others. He refrains from guiding the reader what to feel or how to judge them. There is no sense of aggrandizing O'Brien's role as a soldier. As others die or are wounded, he knows he is not brave, just lucky. Before he shipped out from training, he made detailed plans for deserting to Canada or Sweden and during his tour of duty often wondered whether scrapping that plan was an indication of bravery or cowardice.

As a college educated soldier, he is different from most of his platoon, perhaps accounting for some of his sense of isolation and inability to make close friendships (no "Band of Brothers" mentality here). As a consequence, there is a sense of distancing from the events described. In its place we get a special condensed reflection on the cruelties of war, the contrasts between wise and stupid leaders, and what it takes to survive intense terrors in the face of snipers, mortar attacks, and minefields.

In memory

If I die in a combat zone
Box me up and ship me home
Pin my metals on my chest Tell my mama I did my best.

i read this book my junior year but i was so sleep deprived that i didn’t retain anything i read so i decided to reread & im so happy i did.

not only an a historical fiction girlie but im almost a memoir girlies. so a historical memoir???? yes, thank u.

at moments i found myself zoning out, but o’brien gained my attention back every time. i feel like i was continually entertained learning about o’brien’s experience for the Vietnam war & his courage to speak his mind about why the war was wrong.

When it comes to stories, people often expect a clear meaning and moral.
However, in his book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, Tim O’Brien purposely avoids clearly specifying these elements; rather, the bigger picture of his book is difficult to grasp, and complicated. His purpose is to show the reader that much of life is not straightforward—war is not straightforward, and peace is not straightforward. O’Brien’s purpose of illuminating the complexity of life is skillfully achieved through anecdotes, philosophical diction, and oxymorons.
O’Brien is incredibly successful in mission of exemplifying the intricacy of life to the reader. His use of anecdotes and philosophical diction make the book a more complicated read, but, personally, I like the approach. While it may be confusing at first, O’Brien’s writing style eventually begins to make sense—it isn’t supposed to be straightforward and easily understandable, because the experiences he’s writing about were neither of those things for him. On a much larger scale, War is never straightforward, and neither is life. Society has often come to expect a clear moral and meaning when it comes to stories, but O’Brien’s purpose in this book is to let readers know that real life is rarely as understandable or clear cut as a story. And, in my opinion, he thoroughly achieves this.
O’Brien’s abundant use of anecdotes relays his broader meaning of life’s complexity quite well. He often interjects a main storyline with a smaller story, that sometimes seems as if it is completely unrelated. For example, in chapter 18, O’Brien interrupts his description of a cozy lagoon to discuss the death of a lieutenant on patrol. His deeper meaning in this is to express the intricacy, even irony, of life. Even when one is located in a beautiful place, horrible things can still happen around them. This method of frequently using anecdotes helps achieve O’Brien purpose in writing because of how it initially confuses readers; while the seemingly unrelated anecdote may make the book more convoluted and difficult to understand, it does so on purpose. Because eventually a reader will comprehend the connection, and see that O’Brien weaved all the stories together in a complicated way on purpose, to reflect the complexity of life.
Similarly, O’Brien’s use of philosophical diction helps him achieve his purpose. Throughout the book, O’Brien intermingles his storytelling with philosophical musings. And in chapter 16, he enters what is arguably the most profound section of the book. Here, he talks about what courage is, and how a person can be courageous. For all intents and purposes, the diction here is both incredibly philosophical, and incredibly convoluted. It is difficult to grasp, and reaches a distinct level of profoundness that makes readers themselves understand just how elaborate the whole idea of courage is. It is through philosophical diction such as this that O’Brien reveals the intricacy of life to readers.
All in all, I found that If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home was an amazing read, largely because of how well O’Brien carries out his purpose for the book. His use of anecdotes and philosophical diction forces the reader to understand that this story does not have the clear moral that we have come to expect from stories. Even more importantly, it makes the reader see that all aspects of life, including war, are never as straightforward as we want to them to be. This book truly makes the reader think— not just about what O’Brien is telling them, but also about what it means on a larger scale.

I really get stuck on how to rate books like this and ‘All the Light We Cannot See.’ I put those two in the same genre as anti-war books that focus on the hope in the darkness. The problem is that these books are a) beautifully written, and b) approach the topic of war in a way that can only be described as ‘lacking nuance.’

That is to say that all people more or less agree that war is bad. In the case of ATLWCS, they show the badness of war by showing how it causes the loss of innocence in two young children. It’s a unique take, for sure, but it also seems less poignant to me than, say, the possibility that Nazism could have taken over Europe and wiped out entire races of human beings. All we’re left with is a kind of poetic exercise that really attempts humanity — and mostly succeeds if you take the humanity out of context.

If I Die in Combat Zone isn’t nearly as egregious as ATLWCS, because the mid-late sixties were confusing and because, at the time, the author wasn’t sure he agreed with the war. I think that’s fair. People can, do, and should ask questions of the leaders that put American lives in danger.

The problem is that we have nearly fifty years of hindsight and people are still claiming that the Vietnam War was a bad war to support. Mind you, they are not arguing that American strategy failed or was flawed (they might, but that’s usually beside the point); they are arguing that the very decision to engage in Vietnam was flawed.

Frankly, this point of view holds no water. When America left South Vietnam, the North entered and executed 600,000 non-combatants based on racial differences. For anyone alive in the 80’s, you’ll likely remember the ‘boat people’ of the late 70’s/early 80’s, when people literally mass emigrated from Vietnam due to genocide. Furthermore, if you take the two largest massacres carried out by the North Vietnamese, the number of dead innocents outweighs the total number of innocents killed in aberrant massacres by US troops.

There’s no question that the communist North — trained and indoctrinated by one of Stalin’s most important protégés, Ho Chi Minh (a man who helped Mao Zedong implement the great Chinese famine that killed over 30 million people, by the way) — was the bad guy. At the time, it was a fair question to ask: is the South Vietnamese government really better than the Communist one? With decades of hindsight, though, how can we continue to argue that saving the lives of 600,000 innocent people wasn’t worth it?

What we’re left with, then, at least in my opinion, is a beautiful and tragic book written by a great man who never truly understood the war he was fighting. And how do you judge that? Do you judge the quality of writing? Do you judge the lack of nuance? I don’t know; it makes O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical novel one of the more difficult books to review.

Esordio pazzesco. È il racconto (non so se e quanto romanzato) dell'anno trascorso dall'autore in Vietnam nel 1968 come soldato di fanteria, dall'arruolamento fino al ritorno a casa. O'Brien ha iniziato a scriverlo sul campo di battaglia, mettendo insieme qualche pagina nei momenti di tregua, e lo ha pubblicato nel 1973.
Fin dalle primissime pagine è dichiaratamente un romanzo "contro la guerra", l'autore/personaggio lo manifesta in modo inequivocabile con le parole e i fatti, eppure la forza del romanzo sta tutta nel lucido distacco con cui, molto semplicemente, racconta l'alienante routine del soldato in Vietnam. Non ci sono risposte confortanti o gesti eroici (anzi, il concetto di eroismo viene messo continuamente in discussione e ridotto ai suoi minimi termini). Il protagonista progetta di disertare ma alla fine non lo fa, perché semplicemente non ci riesce. Le storture della gerarchia e del mondo militare sono qualcosa di cui O'Brien si limita a prendere atto. Gli orrori che lui e i suoi commilitoni commettono verso soldati e civili sono descritti come qualcosa di ineluttabile.
Dichiarare che la guerra è sbagliata è facile ("guerra no! brutto!" recitava Guzzanti nel geniale "Il caso Scafroglia"), O'Brien invece lavora per sottrazione e ce la mette davanti agli occhi in tutta la sua mostruosa purezza.

Very solid journal of a Vietnam War experience. The discussions regarding the morality of war, one that no one wanted to fight in the first place, were thought provoking. I appreciate that O'Brien does not glorify war in the slightest.