Vivid and powerful but I liked The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods better

Very good book. Super insightful and packs a punch while making you really think about things.

Tim O'Brien's true reflection of Nam and being drafted despite objecting to war as a concept and especially Vietnam, is a good honest account of his feeling and fears.

Chapters of the book vary dramatically in their style, some being written in the field and some later from memory, some are reflecting on the meaning of courage and the concept of war. A lot is on his heavily planned desertion, prior to being shipped to Nam. Another gives a breakdown on all the types of booby trap and mine they encountered.

As a document or memoir it's an important piece of history. As a young man he was definatey a bookworm prior to his drafting, he spends a lot fo his time in training away from other grunts and the Hung Ho testosterone fuelled block houses and lurks in solitude in the library.

I guess I'm marking at 3 stars and not 4 for the, in my opinion excessive amount of literacy quotes and the the meaning of other authors passages, he refers to Hemingway, Plato and a host of others, as he tries to make sense of his own feelings.

Finally will I re-read this in the future? Unlikely. Am I glad I read it? Yes. Would it be the one book on Vietnam I recommend people read? No, That would have to go to Hal Moore's excellent We Were Soldiers Once and Young.

This is an odd one. I'm reviewing over a month after I finished reading this, which is far more time than I usually leave between finishing a book and reviewing it. Had I reviewed it immediately, I would have probably kept it at the initial five-star rating that I had it at previously. However, when I think about it now, I find that I can remember the concept and the idea of the book, and a few selected things here and there, but overall nothing specific stuck in my mind; there was nothing that remained with me in detail. For that reason, I put it down a star.

This is still a good book. I enjoyed reading it, it was immersive and captivating, one of those snapshot kind of styles that really puts you in the place that it's describing. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but part of my criteria for a five-star rating is longevity. While this book deserves its praise, and certainly its place among the classics of war literature, it does not stand out in my mind as much as some of the others I've read. Aside from that, I have no complaints. It's a harsh and honest look at a pointless and unjust war; it is hardly light reading, and the events it describes will likely leave you feeling frustrated and hopeless, but you'll still be glad you read it. It is short and matter-of-fact, but not a single word is wasted. I will definitely be checking out some of the other things that O'Brien has written.