Strange and not what I was expecting. It's a kind of Quixotian Vietnam novel. Peculiar and a little dated.

yeah this is my worst read so far and it’s gonna take a while to beat it i fear. if it wasn’t for ap lit i would’ve never picked up this book, like nothing about it in the first place interested me and maybe that created a preconceived notion from the beginning, but either way i didn’t enjoy it. if a book needs to be taught while reading it maybe it’s not a good book

This book isn’t about Vietnam, or about the horrors of war, although they do play a prominent role. This book is about courage and hope and fear and being lost. This book is about the uncertainty of life.

Had to force myself to finish. Interesting idea And he writes well about war. But too contrived and too convoluted.

In the category of GREAT WAR NOVELS like CATCH-22 and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, we must also add GOING AFTER CACCIATO.

I am a big fan of O'Brien's THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, which I consider one of the great works of American literature, and loved his memoir IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE, and so I was predisposed to loving this work.

O'Brien's novel is a unique take on the war novel, as it becomes an escape-from-war novel in which the burdens and traumas of war follow the men even as they track as a deserter from Vietnam to France.

O'Brien understands the elements of story and the reason why fiction endures: there is fact and there is truth, and a good story seeks always to appeal "to the nape of the neck, and to the heart and the throat and the stomach" (346).

He is a master, and this work is more proof of his mastery.

I read this book perhaps 20 years ago on my fathers (a World War Two vet with 'shell shock) recommendation. I could see why my father liked it and I probably read it partially through his eyes (I think the anxiety(PTSD) can be somewhat inherited by living with a veteran.
In any case I liked the book a lot! Really well written, fascinating, heartbreaking.

war! unreliable narrator! confusion!

timmy does it again

This might take the crown from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for the most authentic trip experience put to paper. Not that that was the intention, probably, but the platoon's pursuit of Cacciato follows (for me at least) the main beats of onset-visuals-peak-madness-questioning the self-come down-wake up. This is a beautiful, miserable, mad, worthwhile, exhausting book, and it might (might) even do a better job of showing the futility of the Vietnam war and the inability of the participants to ever escape the spectre of it more than The Things They Carried.

A book about the Vietnam war, war generally, and men and morality. Mostly.

The book is told in see-saw, zig-zag fashion, likely because the protagonist Paul Berlin (a small dislike: names like the MC's and title character, presumably chosen for symbolic value, simply didn't resonate as true names for these characters; most notably, Cacciato is an Italian name yet the character seemed distinctly un-Italian) can't keep his head straight in terms of events that transpired during his tour. Likely suffering from what we now term as PTSD, the war plays out in his head as a mosaic with missing pieces. And it also plays out as an imaginative escape from war.

The three central time frames that go back and forth are the real events Berlin has endured in Vietnam; an imaginative day-dream he conjures as an epilogue to the mysterious (as in, unexplained) desertion of Cacciato and his squad's efforts to capture him, which we're told early on ended in the Vietnamese hills, but which Berlin expands into a fantastical tale that involves following Cacciato all the way to his declared destination, Paris; and the one night on sentry duty where this flight of imagination is occurring.

The book excels on almost every level. The writing is vivid and lyrical at times, evoking the land quite viscerally, as well as the sensations of being at war. It helps that Berlin is very afraid. He made the choice to enlist passively, simply not choosing to take active steps to avoid the draft and, not knowing which side is right (pro- or anti-war), ultimately deciding his moral obligation lay in not embarrassing family and community by evading or deserting his duties. Once he's in Nam, there's little morality because it's war and he's focused on subduing his fear and surviving.

All of this is excellent. My main reservation is that I didn't feel as if the characters in the squad were real. There was an element of trope-ism (the smart one, the grizzled one, the urban one, the angry one, the dumb one). That'd be fine if they were symbolic characters for the journey to Paris, but as actual members of Berlin's squad they remained two-dimensional for me.

Even though the story sometimes suffered from stasis -- all that back-and-forth -- it was highly readable and enjoyable. I took the ending (*here comes the spoiler*) to mean that just before the imminent capture of Cacciato, Berlin mis-fired his weapon. And as I understood it literally, Cacciato escaped, leaving behind his dog tags and a few other items. But I have to assume from the near-mythical way Cacciato leads the squad on its chase (always nearby yet somehow out of reach, leaving 'bread crumbs' for them to pick over, etc.) and the emotional impact of the event on Berlin and his need for the ensuing daydream, that maybe another (better) interpretation is Berlin accidentally killed Cacciato. Because Cacciato is mainly a harmless galoot who became Berlin's first friendly face in Nam, a character who is guileless and for that reason also seemingly fearless (again, symbolic as opposed to coming across as real), such a horrific event would explain Berlin's PTSD more than anything else, and thus give a solid basis for engaging his fantasy, wishing for a different outcome. After all, the point seems to be that surviving war is a matter of not only physical imperative, but a mental one.

Read this book with my daughter -- and loved having someone to discuss this book! So good to explore this time period though literature. Gave some real texture to understand the history she's learning -- and I lived through. I remember listening to the news every night as a little girl, and feeling like the war was so far away and feeling so removed.
Good to have the online community to help understand the back and forth timeline and fantasy/reality of the story.

Not gonna lie, it lost me in the second quarter, but once I started to figure out that it was all a shit show and that’s all that mattered I just vibed through the rest of the book. Lots of really good stuff in the last 100 pages. Solid stuff. Would like maybe recommend if you’re into this kinda read but I’m glad to be done with it

More individual and isolating and sad than a lot of war novels I have read.. painfully real we are in his mind. Also 50th book of the year !