Tim O’Brien is the only author writing about the Vietnam War that I have read. While that prevents me from drawing comparisons with other authors writing on the same topic, I’m willing to wager that O’Brien sets a respectably high standard. If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is a gritty, no-holds-barred exposé of the horrors and brutality of war, what it does to people, how it changes them irrevocably.

O’Brien wrote part of this book during his term in Vietnam, so the authenticity of his sentiments and the words he chooses ring true. It was therapy for him at the time, for he wrote “in the last hour of light, after we had dug our foxholes and set out the trip flares.” The act of writing enabled a sanity checkpoint in wildly shifting priorities and circumstances. O’Brien said he felt calmed and restored…he “became human again.”

The theme running through the book is a meditation on courage: what it means personally to the individual, how it is talked about, what it means to know you have it—or lack it. O’Brien is as comfortable drawing from the experiences of being bullied in the eighth grade as he is quoting from Plato’s dialogues on the topic. Living through the Vietnam War seems to define courage in different ways: it is hunting a hidden enemy, sometimes hiding in plain sight blending with civilians; it is keeping one’s head down in a foxhole as bullets and shells tear through the air inches from one’s head.

Courage is also withstanding the psychological ravages of the mind when, for example, navigating a mine field. O’Brien says, “The moment-by-moment, step-by-step decision-making preys on your mind. The effect is sometimes paralysis.” O’Brien felt the war was wrong with enough conviction that he plotted “desertion” even while in infantry training. He went as far as conducting meticulous research for escape to Sweden, hoodwinking parents, friends, and commanders, but ended by burning his plans in mid-desertion because “I simply couldn’t bring myself to flee.” Perhaps this was his brand of courage—fighting a war that he didn’t believe in.

There is graphic violence and death in this book in all its ugly, grotesque, unfair forms—men, women, children, and supremely neutral livestock. Yet in the midst of the chaos of war, almost with serene obscenity, O’Brien observes a brilliant, starry night, a defiantly stunning sunrise, idyllic swimming in the sea, and random acts of human kindness.

If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is all the more gripping because O’Brien is a talented writer. Certainly, he gets personal, but it is, after all, a memoir. Though he writes with restraint, readers will still sense that O’Brien is desperately trying to tell us something about a luminous, yet perplexing truth: man’s pathetic inability to resolve differences without having to go to war over them.

O'Brien tries to write against war, but his version of "war is evil" starts and ends with the unnecessary deaths of American soldiers. He writes that the war in Vietnam was evil because he did not understand it and was forced to fight regardless. He writes at length about his desire to have fought in a war he thinks was "right," like WWII. He does not write about dead Vietnamese people except as set dressing for his moral self-inspection.

There are 3 quite good stories in this book: "Wise Endurance," "Courage Is A Certain Kind of Persevering," and "Don't I Know You?" Skip the rest; you won't miss much.

(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.

Nothing new to add to old review. Was rereading for a class.
If I Die in a Combat Zone is good, but this memoir proves the point O'Brien makes in The Things They Carried: story truth is more true than happening truth.

In my personal opinion, this novel far bypasses The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato. Tim O'Brien fully dives into the mind of a 'Nam G.I. He tells the story from behind the reticle of the rifle, as he and Alpha Company follow the footsteps of Captain Johansen. Not only does the reader get a understanding of the type of respect some men received, but better yet the story shows the heroicism that these men presented. This is not to say that the atrocities his fellow infantrymen committed were not present as well, but it shows the duality of war. How Vietnam was barely objective based, and seemed more as a mission of total destruction. How they would massacre villages in the name of war, slaughter innocents and pillage goods, with no repercussion at all. A study from Brittanica states that over 2 million innocent Vietnamese people lost their life in the war, and yet the Army only criminally charged 57 men. In the time that this book was published, O'Brien was completely countering the American norm of 'aiding foreign nations to stop the spread of communism'. His writing shows how this war was a bloody massacre, and how their feet on the ground did nothing to stop the actual spread of political ideologies. As Malcolm X said best, "You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it".

In memory

If I die in a combat zone
Box me up and ship me home
Pin my metals on my chest Tell my mama I did my best.

It was a quick read. I really like war novels and read this one for class, and it really is an experience. He wrote most of it while he was in Vietnam, in fucking fox holes, too! (Be ready to read a lot of f bombs) It's great. I just wouldn't call it remarkable. It doesn't wrench your heart like every page of All Quiet on The Western Front does.

I loove O’Brien’s way of writing and his short chapters. I thought that this memoir would be a but more easy going, but I loved the constant moralistic questions he posed and intertextuality in the novel.

This is the kind of war book that feels like stories told to you by a new friend you're getting to know: they feel revealing, and raw, and painful but also a bit charming. The mix of just-a-regular-guy and the very skilled writer makes you think he's got it all exactly right, as if there could be only one perspective on such an experience. This and Herr's Dispatches are the two best memoirs I've read on Viet Nam.

I also recommend Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried

Personal copy

I am listening to this book in the audible version over 12 years after I first read it, and I am bumping it up an additional star after experiencing it again. I am not quite sure why I am thinking. It was a better book than I thought. It was the first time. But I do know that as I listened to the beginning of the book, as the author was struggling with the decision of whether he was going to allow himself to be drafted And sent to Vietnam that I thought I was identifying very closely with his struggle. I ended up not going to Vietnam, because I became the father of my first son, and therefore obtained a additional exemption from the draft. It is one of those situations where I will never know what I would’ve done, if I would have actually been drafted. In retrospect, I imagined that I would have gone to Canada or to jail but of course I am not certain of that because I never faced that ultimate decision.

The author spent a good deal of his time in Vietnam, in the same area, where the My Lai incident occurred, although he was there after that famous incident. His description of events gives a good deal of strangely similar experiences to those presented as reasons why soldiers at that time reacted violently against many apparently non-combatant people in Vietnam.

The audible version that I listened to includes a interview with the author about 40 years after the book was first published.
———————————
Tim O’Brien’s war story could have been me. A 1968 college graduate, Tim accepts being drafted in spite of his opposition to the war. He goes to basic training then infantry training, decides to desert to Sweden when it is clear that he is headed for Vietnam, changes his mind mid-desertion and goes off to war. As they say, the rest is historical fiction.

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

This war story is If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, lines from a training marching cadence. He tells a compelling story when he isn’t trying to quote Socrates or Plato or to philosophize about courage. Regarding courage, I suggest skipping chapter 16 where he says, “Whatever it is, soldiering in a war is something that makes a fellow think about courage, makes a man wonder what it is and if he has it.” And “I thought about courage off and on for the rest of my tour in Vietnam.” There is plenty to think about in his descriptive writing.

After the requisite experiences of friends being wasted or losing arms and legs, O’Brien tells about how most soldiers in the Vietnam war zones, including him, worked hard to be transferred to the rear to a desk job.(1) He succeeded and spent the last months of his 365 days in Vietnam processing casualty reports and writing a book.

Although he was not in Vietnam until a year after My Lai (2), the publicity and investigations were in full bloom during his time in the rear. He relates his experiences with one of the officers managing the army spin of the incident. The fictional character Major Callicles represents the old guard of the military whereas O’Brien is the new guard. The line differentiating war and war crimes (3) is as muddy as a rice paddy.

“Now look here, damn it, the distinction is between war and peace,” Callicles said. “This here is war. You know about war? What you do is kill. The bomber pilot fries some civilians – he doesn’t see it maybe, but he damn well knows it. Sure, so he just flies out and drops his load and flies back, gets a beer and sees a movie.” .

Spin doctors have gotten a lot more skillful in the ensuing years and wars. Regrettably, they have had plenty of practice. And the fact that Callicles is the name of a character in one of Plato’s Dialogues must have some relationship to the selection of the name by O’Brien.

My next Tim O’Brien book will be his novel In the Lake of the Woods. I just requested a copy through GR Bookswap. I am also intrigued by the book A Trauma Artist Tim O'Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam.

Footnotes:

(1) O'Brien: “GIs use a thousand strategies to get into the rear. Some men simply shoot themselves in the feet or fingers, careful to mash only an inch or so of bone."

(2) Callicles: “We’re trying to win a war here, and, Jesus, what the hell do you think war is? Don’t you think some civilians get killed? You ever been to My Lai? Well, I’ll tell you, those civilians – you call them civilians – they kill American GIs. They plant mines and spy and snipe and kill us. Sure, you all print color pictures of dead little boys, but the live ones – take pictures of the live ones digging holes for mines.”

(3) Callicles: “There’s a billion stinking My Lai 4s, and they put the finger on us.”

Esordio pazzesco. È il racconto (non so se e quanto romanzato) dell'anno trascorso dall'autore in Vietnam nel 1968 come soldato di fanteria, dall'arruolamento fino al ritorno a casa. O'Brien ha iniziato a scriverlo sul campo di battaglia, mettendo insieme qualche pagina nei momenti di tregua, e lo ha pubblicato nel 1973.
Fin dalle primissime pagine è dichiaratamente un romanzo "contro la guerra", l'autore/personaggio lo manifesta in modo inequivocabile con le parole e i fatti, eppure la forza del romanzo sta tutta nel lucido distacco con cui, molto semplicemente, racconta l'alienante routine del soldato in Vietnam. Non ci sono risposte confortanti o gesti eroici (anzi, il concetto di eroismo viene messo continuamente in discussione e ridotto ai suoi minimi termini). Il protagonista progetta di disertare ma alla fine non lo fa, perché semplicemente non ci riesce. Le storture della gerarchia e del mondo militare sono qualcosa di cui O'Brien si limita a prendere atto. Gli orrori che lui e i suoi commilitoni commettono verso soldati e civili sono descritti come qualcosa di ineluttabile.
Dichiarare che la guerra è sbagliata è facile ("guerra no! brutto!" recitava Guzzanti nel geniale "Il caso Scafroglia"), O'Brien invece lavora per sottrazione e ce la mette davanti agli occhi in tutta la sua mostruosa purezza.

Any Vietnam War story is an automatic 4+ stars to me