Parts sounded so much like a couple of his other books I’ve read. Goes back and forth between story and philosophical wondering. It’s just hard to follow, but there are some really poignant parts.

It was good to read about O'Brien's real Vietnam experience and he is a master storyteller. But I will just keep returning to The Things They Carried.

I learned from this book. I missed the Vietnam draft by a day. I turned 18 at just the right moment. I appreciate this book for showing me what I missed. And I’m so grateful I did. Thank-you, Mr O’Brien, for the priceless information. I am glad you came home safely.

I cannot stop consuming Vietnam War content.

"Can the foot soldier teach anything important about the war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

(3.5) This is a difficult book to read both for its content and its form. If I Die in a Combat Zone is Tim O'Brien's attempt to understand his failures and why he participated in a war he was so adamantly against. His account of the Vietnam War is not particularly enlightening–military men can be violent, bloodthirsty, callous, and mad–I knew this already having studied history for over 20 years and, more specifically, the My Lai massacre in 1968. Throughout the war, O'Brien is constantly questioning the notion of courage: what makes someone courageous? Greek philosophers, he tells us, argue that courage is endurance. And O'Brien's experience is one of endurance from his training as an infantryman to encountering the gruesome realities of war. But is endurance really courage? I'm not entirely convinced and O'Brien isn't either.

If I Die in a Combat Zone is fiction, but it is a narrative based on O'Brien's real-life experience. It was only in reading the extra libris that I understood why he chose not to write the book as non-fiction: "A history is limited by the unknown and the unknowable...A history reduces. A history omits. A history generalizes. And yet, by and large, we regard our history textbooks as 'true,' while we regard Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as 'untrue'." It's about categorization and expectation. We expect fiction to be a creation and expect history to be objective and true because it's based on facts. But fiction can be "true" just as history can be "untrue." History is interpretative. Yes, the historian has facts at her disposal, but how we organize those facts matters. We create a story, a story based on facts but not entirely factual either. Given that O'Brien chose fiction as his medium, I'm surprised by the lack of creativity. Too many technical terms are left unexplained. His "characters" are meaningless. We learn little of their futures unless they die in some horrific manner. Where O'Brien does succeed is in recreating the deep feeling of unease. War is an uncomfortable subject but one we should confront.

This is Tim O'Brien's other book about the Vietnam war. It is very similar to "The Things they Carried" but this book is one big story instead of many smaller stories. Tim O'Brien includes the same detailed violence of the Vietnam War but different characters and relationships. This book wasn't as enjoyable as "The Things they Carried" but it still has the elements of the same war. These include death, trauma and experiences you can only indulge at war. Tim O'Brien writes from the first person perspective only instead of how he writes from multiple perspectives in his other book. Overall, this book is decent but, if you enjoy the Vietnam war then I would recommend this book.

The book If I Die In A Combat Zone ultimately gave me an in-depth look at not only the Vietnam War, but also what goes through a soldier's mind before, during, and after the war. Tim O'Brien mainly focused on how emotionally tough the war was for soldiers like him. Tim O’Brien conveys this by using imagery of the fear that he experienced as well as repeatedly bringing up fear to make the reader feel what these soldiers had to emotionally go through.
Throughout the book, O’Brien brilliantly utilizes repetition to emphasize the fear of embarrassment and dying that soldiers had to always think about. One example that really stuck out was when O’Brien was deciding whether or not to participate in the war. Before the war he considered whether or not he should flee to Canada to avoid the violent, unjust war that he was obligated to go to. However, he never went through with the plan since he didn’t want to embarass not only himself, but his family. Even during the war, soldiers feared embarrassment. During the war, Tim O’Brien mentioned that at times he just felt like completely giving up because he didn’t have the effort to keep going. The fear of embarrassment made O’Brien keep going. The fear of dying was also very prominent in a soldier's head during the war. Dying scared every single soldier in the war and O’Brien made that clear by repeating this throughout the book. By Tim O’Brien repeating this fear of embarrassment and dying throughout the book, it ultimately showed the reader that soldiers were emotionally suffering even though they would never show it.
Tim O’Brien also applies imagery to his book to capture this constant fear. There was one part in particular that really exhibits how Tim O’Brien can use imagery to make the reader feel the fear. On page 88, O’Brien says, “The man to the front and the man to the rear were the only holds on security and sanity. We followed the man in front like a blind man after his dog; we prayed that the man had not lost his way, that he hadn’t lost contact with the man to his front. We tensed our eyeballs, peered straight ahead. We hurt ourselves staring. We dared not look away for the fear the man leading us might fade and turn into shadow.” By Tim O’Brien using imagery like this, he takes the reader into the image and makes the reader experience the fear that he was feeling during that time.
My reaction to If I Die In A Combat Zone is overall very positive. Tim O’Brien definitely conveyed his message of how soldiers were constantly in fear during the Vietnam War. The way that Tim O’Brien went about telling these personal experiences really made me feel as if I was in his shoes experiencing all the mental struggles that he had to face as a soldier. When I first got this book, I expected learning just about the Vietnam War, but I learned more than that. I learned about what was happening inside a soldier’s head and how they had to deal with fear 24/7.

Pretty tame compared to his other works, reads more like a diary of his tour of duty and the days leading up to his being drafted. I suppose it is an accurate reflection of the way the Vietnam war was, with days of doing nothing, almost like a tropical vacation if not for the ever present potential for death and dismemberment. Scenes of gore and sudden violence in the form of mines and booby traps are depicted in a matter-of-fact dispassionate tone of voice perhaps alluding to the desensitization to violence the author felt while over there, as a way of coping with the daily roulette of random life or death many of the troopers developed. There is also much philosophical debate and personal wrangling over whether desertion is justified if one opposes the war. I think being the well bred middle class white boy that he was, he could not bear to impose self exile and just went along with it.

Tim O’Brien’s memoir about his experiences in Vietnam. O’Brien had graduated college and was not a supporter of the war. He considered going to Canada or even deserting, but eventually decided to go through with it. The reader is privy to his thought processes as he makes these difficult decisions. This book vividly describes one soldier’s tour of duty in sufficient detail to give the reader an excellent idea of what it was like to serve in Vietnam. He brings in elements of philosophy and discusses what it was like to be in the midst of another country’s civil war. It was interesting reading this book after I had already read The Things They Carried. One is fiction; one is non-fiction, but there are many obvious parallels. I count myself as a fan of Tim O’Brien’s writing and highly recommend both books.

This is a true to life memoir about his experiences in My Lai and My Khe in Vietnam. Tim writes about his doubts about going to war, about what constitutes courage and wise endurance, and a smattering of war stories involving his fellow soldiers. I did not find it as enjoyable as Things They Carried, perhaps because the fiction genre allowed him some poetic license.

This book can be rightfully placed alongside "Red Badge of Courage" or "All Quiet on the Western Front". Of course, with a notable exception, it's a memoir, not fiction.