Didn't sit well.

The author despises the Vietnam War, which of course is easy to do. Despite the sparsely interspersed philosophizing, no serious arguments are made, only questions raised. The author has a position that he takes for granted is right and it's good enough for him. It is not a bad read, but the lack of clarity left me cold, and the rant towards the end coming from "Callicles" surely was a mean spirited caricature. Despite a few high points, I was ultimately disappointed.

Really like this O’Brien guy if you can’t tell

What can I say - I read this book in a single day, loving how the author so easily transitioned from first person to second without breaking stride. His writing is hard to describe without seeming insincere and the story is both beautiful and horrible in the same breath. In the end, I feel more capable of understanding without ever finding true understanding of my husband's time in a combat zone. The conflict of the soul, the desire to be something without understanding how, the need to live, the guilt that he did. I get the feeling I'll mull these pages over for a long time.

Loved it. Short, powerful, honest, and conveyed with an economy of language to make his own favorite writers proud, O’Brien nails the memoir format, illuminates the experience of war, and captures multiple aspects of the quagmire that was Vietnam.

In many ways it reads like The Things They Carried, divided up into 19 pretty short chapters of 10 pages or less, each focusing on one scene, one part of his life, one idea that permeates the war experience. I’ve always thought that “war stories” are hard to nail because one person’s war story may not be like another’s – but this O’Brien’s format here works very well as he pulls together a wide variety of experiences and scenes and people to portray an overarching picture of war. He gives us a short, 4-page chapter about his hometown, a 10-page chapter about boot camp, a 3-page chapter about a scene with an old man at a well in Vietnam, a couple 10-page chapters about different patrols and sweepings of villages, and a couple of unabashed chapters confronting the notions of courage, cowardice, opposition to the war, and even detailing his 90% completed plan to avoid the war and live in Europe instead. His honesty in confronting each of these tough subjects is formidable and laudable, especially in this age of expectations and pressure. And he certainly doesn’t shy away from conveying his own fear, his own inability to act, his own separateness from the rest of the soldiers.

What I found most interesting was the sections that really showed the daily life of a grunt, and especially the sections that portrayed the soldiers (and officers) dinking around, dealing with the monotony by creating a stir and throwing grenades at nothing in the night, and even going to lengths by avoiding certain missions – even faking raids by calling in phony reports throughout the night. I was surprised by how often supply choppers brought beer into the field and everyone would sit around drinking, how often they would head back to some LZ to lounge around with the amenities of home. Granted, he doesn’t make it sound like a Spring Break trip, but I’m just saying, it jumped out at me – I don’t remember any scenes like this in any other book about WWII, Vietnam, Iraq where soldiers are smoking pot, drinking beer, swimming in the ocean without worry. I guess I’ve just read so much lately about the wars in the Middle East that this seemed… shocking? Surprising? Most of all, I felt like I could really empathize with O’Brien’s perspective – out of college, against the war, feeling the cultural pressures around him, frozen and observing: I can’t even imagine if we had the draft nowadays and I was forced to go at 22.

Great read. Short, easy to follow, well-organized, and captures the full range of a soldier’s emotions and experiences.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later ...

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor" ..

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

- from Ezra Pound's, 'Hugh Selwyn MauberAnnotateley (Part One) Life and Contacts'

I have a younger brother who served in Afghanistan and an older brother who served multiple times in Iraq and Afghanistan. War memoirs are important to me. They give me some peek, some window to the full burden I carry as the brother who didn't see combat and wasn't changed forever during or killed after a war that was impossible to fully justify as a soldier. Only one percent of us (in the US) serve. And only a small fraction of the military serves on the tip of the spear. So, we need help. We need good writers who have served to comeback and give us a peek at the ugly cost we don't feel, to expose us to the loss that we can never really understand, to give us a moment's exposure to the weight we left for others.

Anyway, O'Brien (one of the best known writers seasoned by the Vietnam war) wrote a solid war memoir. Things I liked: the cover, Plato, Eric as mirror, dialogue, etc. Things I didn't: O'Brien didn't add much to the combat veteran memoir, repetitious, risk-free, light. Sure it was updated with the particular nuances of the Vietnam experience, but it was rather safe (a bizarre thing to say about a memoir of a combat vet).

Don't get me wrong. I liked it. I appreciated it, and will read more of Tim O'Brien. I just didn't think this was on par with Robert Graves, Michael Herr, Guy Sayer, Artyom Borovik, Bob Kotlowitz, etc. Good but just not great. I say this realizing I'm reading this 40+ years after it was first published. I allow that I may think the book is safe only because the road of Vietnam war memoirs was built with a helluva lot of O'Brien's own bricks and blood.
___________________

His first book right? War wasn’t even over. Seems he really needed to get this off his chest. On the adequately dubbed Mad Mark’s chest, you’d find the necklace of dead Vietcong ears, literally. Read it for more painfully detailed descriptions of gore. Rape too. Less detailed, thankfully.
No but it’s really not about that. It’s about courage, or wise endurance, wrestling with desertion. It’s about the military sense of humor (which includes fake ambushes on April fool’s day) and landmines (do you know the difference in between a Toe-popper and a Bouncing Betty? There’s a fun typology that can help you with that in the best titled chapter for such a topic, ‘step lightly’.), and about dilemmas (this path hasn’t had any mines so far. “Therefore we should stay on it!” “Therefore we should leave it!”). Trapped! Yet, how the war is missed once stateside. Quick, beautiful read in which the literary fat has been trimmed.

Tim O'Brien is a great liar who always convinces me that he is deeply and sincerely -- perhaps even profoundly -- honest. If I Die in a Combat Zone is a memoir, but I went into it with both eyes open.

After all, one of the best parts of The Things They Carried is not actually reading the book (though it is a very good book). Instead, it's when you learn that Tim O'Brien does not have a daughter, let alone one named Kathleen.

He's pulling out the same tricks here. He writes with sincerity, self analysis, and shares details that seem to suggest credibility. Would a liar share this?

The rest of the men talked about their girls, about R & R and where they would go and how much they would drink and where the girls performed the best tricks. I was a believer during those talks. The vets told it in a real, firsthand way that made you hunger for Thailand and Manila. When they said to watch for the ones with razor blades in their vaginas--communist agents--I believed, imagining the skill and commitment of those women.

Or how about when he looks at the people in the town he grew up in and dismisses them all as unthoughtful "wage earners?" He looks down upon his fellow soldiers during boot camp but begins to reconsider both them and himself when he reaches the front.

When he wonders whether vets can speak to any great truths, he decides not. Instead, he figures:

They can tell war stories.

Well, there are some good stories here, and, regardless of what claim they can make on the truth, they often made me think.

And I particularly liked the final lines of this memoir on the Vietnam War. He is returning from the war and writes:

You take off your uniform. You roll it into a ball and stuff it into your suitcase and put on a sweater and blue jeans. You smile at yourself in the mirror. You grin, beginning to know you're happy. Much as you hate it, you don't have civilian shoes, but no one will notice. It's impossible to go home barefoot.

Recommended.

I cannot stop consuming Vietnam War content.

A thinking man in Vietnam was a dangerous thing. Being a soldier in Vietnam was a dangerous thing. Tim O'Brien was both and somehow he managed to live to survive it and tell his story. He ends up in Vietnam after unsuccessfully dealing with his conflict between doing the right thing and being a courageous man. He tells of his decision not to follow his well planned escape route and stay with his country and its proposal to send him to Viet Nam. O'Brien describes Vietnam as a place with nameless soldiers and Buddys, faceless enemies and endless minefields.
This is an excellent text for learning about the experience of the Vietnam war, the choices that young man were faced with at that time and basic dilemmas in making moral decisions. It is a well written book which makes for a quick, satisfying read.

All of O'Brien's Vietnam War novels are hands down the best fiction written on the Vietnam War. He is the Hemingway of Vietnam War fiction, and I'm not saying that lightly or flippantly.

This was the first of O'Brien's three great Vietnam novels and the other two are actually better than this one. His writing is so good because he conveys all of the emotions and messiness associated with war without glorifying or vilifying anyone in particular.

The point of his works seems to be catharsis or record of the feelings and experiences associated with the war for people to consider before engaging in conflicts - which is something that has been taken too lightly over the last decade and a half.

O'Brien weaves his conflicted thoughts on the ethics of the war, possibility and responsibility associated with dodging the draft or fighting in a war he doesn't believe in, pressures of duty and obligations to please others, fear, boredom, bravery, and death. In this work, these all come together into a pseudo journal layered over snapshots of events and experiences during his time there which give a general impression of what his time was like.

This, The Things They Carried, and Going After Cacciato should be widely read and thought about in depth before making the decision to engage in armed conflict with others, because soldiers and - to a different extent - their families bear the sacrifices and struggles associated.

Honest memoir of O'Brien's tour in Vietnam. His careful word choice conveys the horror of war without preaching or using overly graphic descriptions. The Man at the Well chapter is an especially powerful 2 pages of literature. Many reviewers knocked it as not being "as good" as The Things They Carried, which is a mistake. They are two different genres and each has its distinct purpose.

I really enjoyed this book I actually liked it a lot more than the things they Carried. I think what I liked is how raw it felt and at times while reading this I could feel the fear and panic and just hatred of the whole situation. Overall I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the Vietnam war or combat memoirs.