If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

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.

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.

If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973) is author Tim O'Brien's account of his tour of duty in Vietnam (1968-70). In contrast to some of the other Vietnam memoirs I've read (Dispatches by journalist Michael Herr, Patches of Fire by Albert French, for example), If I Die is cool and detached in its style. O'Brien was already a college graduate when he was drafted, and after his tour went on to graduate school at Harvard and ultimately an academic career. So his intellectual approach to his draft dilemma (go to Vietnam or go to Canada?) and to his discussion of courage is to be expected. But I also sense a certain midwestern modesty, an understated quality in his character that accounts for a, maybe, more sparse and more analytical approach to describing the horrors of war. But it's like the time my very affirming, non-judgmental mother-in-law called someone a 'scumbag.' It was a mild insult, but coming from her its unexpectedness gave it an extra punch.

O'Brien is a matter-of-fact witness to the troubling behaviors of soldiers and their commanders alike, and to the insane and incomprehensible strategies of the Vietnam-era military itself. He describes many aspects of being an infantryman in Vietnam: ineffective leadership, futile ambushes, and poorly-planned and executed missions -- as well as the commander who wouldn't risk landing his helicopter to evacuate wounded soldiers on the brink of death.

O'Brien touches on the folklore of war, including the ways of speaking that allow men to avoid the realities of what's really happening. The Vietnamese are "dinks and slopes" rather than people. They are "wasted" rather than killed. Your fellow soldiers go by nicknames in most cases. And as foot soldiers in heavily mined and boobytrapped Pinkville, O'Brien and his fellows coped with the constant fear of and carnage from mines by assigning them goofy names. He writes: "….the catalog of mines will be retained, because that is how we talked about them, with a funny laugh, flippantly, with a chuckle. It is funny. It’s absurd. Patent absurdity. The troops are going home, and the war has not been won, even with a quarter of the US Army fighting it. We slay one of them, hit a mine, kill another, hit another mine." It's devastating stuff, and maybe especially coming from the sober, sane voice of Tim O'Brien.

At a certain point during his tour, O'Brien is assigned to an office job in the rear. The military's preoccupations there are primarily with curbing marijuana use, reigning in black soldiers, and lording it over local allies (see the sardonically titled chapter "Hearts and Minds").

At the end, O'Brien suggests, there is no moral to the story. No point to it all. Just as there was no point in the war itself. Riding the airplane home to Minnesota after his tour he comments, as if taunting himself: "In return for all your terror, the prairies stretch out, arrogantly unchanged."

That may be the greatest tragedy of all -- that many of us remained arrogantly unchanged by the Vietnam War. I would challenge every American citizen to read at least a couple of these Vietnam war memoirs. The idea of patriotism is tossed around so lightly, but if you take patriotism to its logical extreme, you might find yourself in some foreign land, killing people and watching your friends be killed. You owe it to yourself to give it some consideration.

Written in 1975, it has been surpassed by many later books which much more effectively and movingly convey the story of the soldier and marine in Vietnam. No character development. Too much self-indulging "philosophy", pompously quoting Plato and others. A book written just after the War's end by a college graduate who was drafted (for 2 years)rather than volunteer for Officer training (four year committment. As with many such college grads during the Vietnam era, he was an anti-Vietnam, anti-military, "silent" protester, slacker...and amateur philosopher who saw himself as superior to everyone in the US military, especially to all senior officers.

Read some OTHER books about the Vietnam War...not this one. You'll learn/understand MUCH more.

3.5

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be drafted into the war at a young age? Tim O’Brien experiences first hand the stresses and decisions that needed to be made when he first learned he was drafted for the Vietnam War in the summer of 1968. In the memoir If I Died in a Combat Zone: Box Me up and Ship Me Home, Tim O’Brien talked with his friends as he explains, “I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now, that the war was wrong. And since it was wrong and since people were dying as a result of it, it was evil” (18). O’Brien was torn between what he should, and should not do. Within himself he instilled all the values his parents have passed along and those reminiscing thoughts pulled him in the other direction. He said, “It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer of war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued the order. I also feared its opposite – inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all” (22). O’Brien decided to serve for his country.

O’Brien tells his stories throughout the memoir of his personal encounters as a soldier and human being. He does not try to make himself sound like a hero of great magnitude; O’Brien was more interested in leaving Vietnam than actually being there. O’Brien’s work shows how truly negative he is about being at war, and the job he entails there.

After being deployed into the Alpha company, 5th Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, O’Brien describes his scenarios and events that took place there. One being, all the mines that were encountered by the infantrymen and the ways they work, and the torture and killings they produce. He says, “The Bouncing Betty is feared most. It is a common mine. It leaps out of its nest in the earth, and when it hits its apex, it explodes, reliable and deadly…The fellow takes another step and begins the next and his backside is bleeding and he’s dead. We call it “ol’ step and a half” (122). The reality of these mines is the deaths and tortures they produce are real. I was amazed at the fatalities and near death experiences soldiers came in counter with when they are faced with crossing these mines.

Like every other soldier in his Alpha Company, O’Brien just works hard so he can get a job as a rear echelon officer. In which they can leave the battle zone, and move back towards safer cover. Throughout the book you will discover his adventure towards his return home. In the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me up and Ship Me Home, Tim O’Brien writes about the personal experiences of what occurs at war, and the harsh realities of death and fighting. He questions, “Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advice others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories” (23).

If there is any writer who can be counted upon to give at one and the same time both a literary and historically accurate picture of the Vietnam War from the point of view of the Army grunt, it is Tim O'Brien. With If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, I have now finished reading all three of his best known fiction and nonfiction works about the war.

This is his nonfiction book, which is about his own experiences, particularly fighting in "Pinkville," which is what the army jocularly called the area around My Lai, where the famous massacre took place. While O'Brien mentions it only in passing (he wasn't there at the same time as Lieutenant Calley), he depicts the dangers of fighting in the area. I was particularly impressed by the chapter entitled "Step Lively," about the many types of manufactured and improvised mines he and his fellow troopers encountered. (I was particularly awed at the famous "Bouncing Betty" mines which jumped up to waist-height before exploding.)

O'Brien managed to transfer from Alpha Company's combat activities to a clerical job before being sent home to Minnesota after his stint was up.

This is a superb book and should be read by anyone who is interested in our participation in the war in Vietnam.

I love Tim O'Brien. In this book he talks a lot about bravery and courage and how most people don't have it, but what does it really mean, and is it a life-defining moment? Does one act of bravery make someone brave for life? Does one act of cowardice make them a coward for life?

Thank you, Mr. O'Brien, for having the bravery and courage to write your books sharing your experiences.