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.

Memoir, not fiction. Youth and inexperience, as in Keith Douglas’s Alamein to Zem Zem, give the writing distinction and immediacy.

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.

Do you ever find yourself wondering about war, the military training, and what the battlefields look like? In the book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O’Brien it lays out the training at fort Lewis, the battlefields and what it's like to go to My Lai in the Vietnam war.
Throughout the book Tim O’Brien writes about his hometown where he grew up. In Chapter Two, Pro Patria on page thirteen within O'Brien's hometown some of the town's folks were talking; and one said: “Nothing to do with causes or reasons; the war was right, they muttered, and it had to be fought.” This is important because O’Brian finds himself wondering about the war later in life when he gets a draft letter in the summer of 1968. Throughout that summer his family didn't talk about the war; O’Brien spent that summer like most of his others drinking beer or coffee and playing pool.
When O’Briens is at Fort Lewis in Washington in the beginning he doesn't plan to make any friends; although he ends up making friends with Erik. One day in late September while Erik and O’Brien were polishing their shoes, and cleaning their guns; the drill sergeant, Sargent Blyton, finds them sitting in the barracks. He calls them “A couple of college pussies” (page 47). Later that night sergeant puts them on night duty and they feel the most “Free” they ever felt in the weeks that they've been there. This being most likely because there was not a sergeant yelling at them and because they can talk about whatever they want.
In Addition, O’Brien gets assigned to be a footsoldier, and Erik signs up for one more year of infantry training. While O’Brien is a footsoldier he lays out what it's like to be in the battlefields of My Lai. Also in the book it says, “ On the perimeter of the village, the company began returning fire, blindly, spraying the hedges with M-16 and M-70 and M-60 fire. No targets, nothing to aim at and kill. Aimlessly, just shooting to shoot. It had been going like this for weeks - snipers, quick little attacks, blind counterfire.” (page 7). This is one of the examples of how O’Brien paints a picture of how the war is. There are many brutal parts in the war, and many positive sides as O’Brien explains about in If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.
In the end of the book, it is really sexist. This is because O’Brien writes about girls like they are toys. In the book a character named Mad Mark says “Bullshit, who's gonna eat a goddamn dink? I eat women, not dead dinks.” (page 84) This shows that Mad Mark is comparing women to dead vietnamese people. By doing so, comparing women to dead soldiers dehumanizes women. Women are more than just toys and objects to compare to vulgar things. Another quote from the book that shows it is sexist is “If I die in a combat zone, Box me up and ship me home. An’ if I die on the Russian front, Bury me with a Russian cu*t” (Page 43-44) This shows it is sexist because it call a woman a cu*t and they don’t care about women. This is so, because there is no point in calling women who sleep with one man names.
In the end I really like the book altho there are downfalls to the book. For example, like the sexist parts. And the way that O’Brien paints the war is nice. He doesn't sugar coat anything. He shows the dark of the war and how everyone was treated.

I'm just going to list some of my notes about the problems I had with this book because let's be honest: nothing was really gained or developed that made these critiques invalid, even towards the end of the book.

I have exactly four major dislikes about this book (plus some specific things that pissed me off).

1. O'Brien's horrid writing style.

He talked way too much about his pretentious ideas of *sigh* courage and Plato (god, at least he's putting that collage degree to good use?) and focused on the most random shit that I couldn't care about while neglecting to talk more about the stuff that interested me. Which brings me to the second part.


2. The lack of regret or shame in this book as he causally mentioned soldiers targeting civilians (himself included).

This criticism, I really think, is up for interpretation. I viewed it as him using grief to try to justify the crimes committed and being all "Vietnam was just HELL and we couldn't tell the civilians from the VC anymore! So we just attacked random civilians :(." Honestly, the sympathy I feel for the American soldiers is the same that I feel for the Nazis and the Japanese soldiers in WW2. I'm sure a lot of them were pressured by their countries or forced but it's never going to overshadow what I feel for their victims. Remember, kids: having an explantation doesn't excuse your immoral, criminal actions!

Especially since he (maybe) expresses 0.5 point of guilt for his actions while using up how many pages to talk about the random shit I don't care about that I mentioned earlier.

There is a chapter where he wonders what courage is and a bunch of other worthless talk that amounts to nothing, and I'm pretty sure he ends it with hopeful that all the soldiers are worthy of "second chances". The lack of regret or anything in like vein of thinking makes me think no - that's not how second chances are supposed to work. (Especially that scene with them blowing up a Buddha statue at a welcoming monastery and then not even mentioning if they apologized?? Fuck you.) If you really don't think you did nothing wrong, that's being delusional, not getting a second chance. And the courage talk is total bull because everyone who was an American soldier in Vietnam were either idiots or cowards (the author himself even indirectly agrees so ha!)

The majority of this was written two years after the war, so don't tell me he hasn't had time to reflect on this actions.


3. The role of the Vietnamese in this book.

Another review of this book, I'm pretty sure, mentioned this but the Vietnamese people in this book are essentially used as props for his moral reflection.

I bet this guy was a philosophy major; he's just that self-righteous.

He didn't care about what the South Vietnamese were going through or how the war and American soldiers affected their lives. He basically put them into two categories: the bad Vietcong, and the good villages that worship the ground the Americans walk on, even when they get abused! Oh joy!

He literally tries to figure out how complex war and the American military is but doesn't extend that thinking to the enemy, even though that's the interesting part in this war: the Vietcong and the civilians! (I'm going to link a video of another American soldier who'd gone to Vietnam and talked about it because he actually talks about the people and how they were affected, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOy...)


3. The complete lack of development/knowledge gained in this book.

What did anybody learn from this book? O'Brien wasn't even in the thick of it. He was just there and then he was gone. In the end chapter, he acts like he learned and grew from the war but he really didn't. He started it as a coward, just going along with everything to not upset the flow, and ended it as a coward, the entire time just passing judgment on others. I guess I can't blame him: the psychology behind the reason for war crimes is obedience (which is a pretty word for cowardliness) from the soldiers.


For a guy who acts like he's so morally righteous and smart for being anti-Vietnam War, he's so oblivious about who was most hurt by the war: the Vietnamese people, not the Americans, pal.

That was their country, no matter how many times you're going to refer to it as a hell and evil (a scene that really stuck with me was when the flight attendant at the end was spraying disinfectant to get rid of "asian evils" and more bull like that), so I really want to tell O'Brien to get off his self-pitying high horse because he's really oblivious to his privilege (I don't want to invalidate his trauma or how he processes it, but seriously? Have some self-awareness); at least his home wasn't trashed and destroyed by foreigners.

Whatever. I would burn this book like it was Bridget Jones's Diary but, alas, it's a school book... Anyway, there are way better things talking about Vietnam that isn't this stupid book.

An awesome piece of writing. Harrowing, thought provoking, raises many questions about humanity. Why wasn't this book on the school syllabus when I was growing up?

War, what is it good for?

Requested this from my local library on Veterans Day, and just plowed through it on my daily Metro grind this week. I'm not much of a memoir-reader generally, but I thought that it would be appropriate reading in honor of Veterans Day (well, sort of). In some ways it was your typical Vietnam-dysfunctional story that we have all heard before. I think the thing that was most interesting though was the personalization of the dysfunctional war story, and the thinking of a reluctant soldier involved in that war. he could have gotten a deferment, and he could have run to Norway (he had the plans together), but he shipped off to Vietnam. The story is very much focused on O'Brien, and the other individuals come and go briefly from the narrative. The picture of the memoir is narrow and doesn't dwell on the geopolitical issues of the era. Its about a soldier going through a war that in many ways seems to be several different repetitive patterns that never really accomplished anything - other than O'Brien surviving and being honest about how he did it.

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 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.

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.

If you have the time, I highly recommend reading this book alongside the marvellous and gripping Ken Burns documentary about Vietnam in which the author plays a prominent role. In the documentary we get snippets of the fear, the absurdity, and at times the adrenaline rush of what being a combat soldier in Vietnam felt like. Majestic as the documentary is however, it is here in O’Brien’s memoir of his experience of the war, that it is fleshed out and truly comes to life. In these pages he loses more friends than he can count, clinically recounts the staggering number of different land mines that soldiers were likely to encounter (until he himself seemingly corrects himself halfway through the litany to laugh morbidly at how grotesque an endeavour it is).
This is not a book about battles however.
This is a very personal account of a very scared young man struggling to find bravery and some truth in what he sees around him. In retrospect, he finds very little of either:

“Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn’t and most didn’t care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?”

Perhaps these are truths. Whatever these insights are, they came with a heavy cost to the author that he will probably be paying for the rest of his life. That he paid that cost and gave us this memoir to help future young men and women avoid paying it, is a service to his country that far surpasses anything he achieved in the Vietnamese jungle. With the clouds of war hanging menacingly over Asia once again, this book has become more prescient and important than ever. As the author himself so eloquently writes:

“I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows, from one who’s been there and come back, an old soldier looking back at a dying war.”

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