Going After Cacciato's preface is: Soldiers are dreamers ~ Siegfried Sassoon which gives you an idea of the story inside. We follow Spec Four Paul Berlin, Doc, Eddie Lazzutti, Harold Murphy, Stink, Oscar and Lt Corson as they go after Cacciato, who split, gone AWOL and headed to Paris, on foot, from Vietnam. A bizarre mission that at times you wonder if it's really possible. The possibilities. "...it wasn't dreaming - it wasn't even pretending, not in the strict sense. It was an idea. It was working out the possibilities. It was a way of asking questions. What became of Cacciato? Where did he go, and why? What were his motives, if he had them, if they mattered? What happened, and what might have happened?" Cacciato leading them west through peaceful country toward Paris..."a splendid idea".At 20 years of age, Paul Berlin gets drafted into the Army to fight a war he doesn't understand. After arriving at Chu Lai for "now-or-never training", his first letter home begs his father to look up Chu Lai in a world atlas "right now, I'm a little lost", sums it up pretty good. The new soldiers are ill-prepared for what faces them. Their NCOs telling them, "I don't wanna scare the bejesus out of you, but shit, you guys are gonna die." Berlin tries to focus on his father's words of wisdom, "Keep your eyes open and your ass low. You'll see some terrible stuff, sure, but try to look for the good things. They'll be there if you look. So watch for them." And that was what Berlin did - kept his eye peeled for the good things. Figuring how things might have happened on the road to Paris, it was a way of looking for the very best of all possible outcomes. Think about the good things, keep your eye on Paris.O'Brien takes us on an Alice in Wonderland type trip and it does get "trippy". He writes of the horrors the soldiers face without grossing the reader out but still maintains the punch. Like Psycho's (the original) shower scene - minus the violence, mostly, but showing the aftermath, and the effects on the soldiers. We see how each one copes with it all. Inserted, are some thought provokers like the politics of war, how the villagers might think of the soldiers, whether the VC foot soldiers feel the same as our soldiers - just small seeds of thought, no preaching or rambling with no answers. Mostly questions being tossed out there for us to ponder.Interspersed with the "mission" to capture Cacciato or the "trip to Paris" are the actual happenings, the reality checks. But even those are told in a way that's almost mystical, where I have to reread some parts to fully understand what had happened. There's some humor, on the satirical side, some dark which is right up my alley. One scene in particular, where Berlin gets promoted from Private to Spec Four. He's questioned by a three-officer panel where one of them focuses on Berlin's surname. "Berlin. That's a pretty f***ed-up name, isn't it? The weirdest name I've ever run across. Don't sound American. You an American, soldier? Where'd you get such a screwy name? Sheeet." It goes on in a hilarious way. It cracked me up, anyway.My favorite scene is done in a hotel conference room, a dramatic play of a mini Peace Talks, between two parties, Spec Four Paul Berlin and Sarkin Aung Wan (who the reader meets earlier in the book and becomes a key player). The messages they both convey hit me deep as I'm sure other readers will experience. One line in particular is rather timely for me - "Having dreamed a marvelous dream, I urge you to step boldly into it, to join your dream and to live it. Don't let fear stop you." Wan's argument is for Berlin to pursue his dream and not be deceived by false obligations. "For what is true obligation but to pursue a life at peace with itself? March proudly into your own dream." Berlin counters with his thoughts on obligation - "It's more than a claim imposed on us; it is a personal sense of indebtedness. A feeling, an acknowledgement, that through many prior acts of consent we have agreed to perform certain future acts." ..."My obligation is to people, not to principle or politics or justice." Berlin goes on and one of his questions, "If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?"...."Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one's own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect....We all want peace. We all want dignity and domestic tranquility. But we want these to be honorable and lasting. We want a peace that will endure. We want a peace we can be proud of. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligation cannot be out-run. Imagination, like reality, has its limits."Thank you Tim O'Brien for your imagination and your sense of obligation. For that is a precious gift to us and future generations of readers.
In the whole of human history, I am of the extremely small percentage of males that did not fight in a war nor had my life changed as a result of one. I am extremely fortunate to have been twice lucky: born both where and born when. So whether it is a truth-seeking need to understand the sadness that countless men and women have had to endure, or it is some atavistic genetic tugging that keeps leading me back to these stories, I am addicted to the threnody of War.Although I will read almost any non-fiction book on war that is recommended to me, it is fiction based upon events that really resonates. If you've read Vonnegut, you can chart his growth as an author through his first few books as he is circling around the main event - until he finally deals with his experience in the fire bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that changes the reader because Kurt was changed by war. It's not a rational transaction. But neither is life.Going After Cacciato is a book that has the capacity to re-wire the filters of a reader. The Vietnam War is the setting, but the individual wars suffered and fought daily by the soldiers is the narrative. The action follows a squad of men and their quixotic chase after a fellow soldier gone AWOL with plans to hoof it all the way to Paris from Indochina. As readers we become as changed as the soldiers on their journey. To explain further would be to ruin the magic - consider this great quote on the back cover of my edition, taken from a New York Times review: "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales." Virgil C. Dice, Jr. Ready for action.My father was 26 years old when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He had just graduated with a masters in music and had planned on a career as a concert pianist. He and my mother planned on getting married as soon as he finished his graduate program - he petitioned his Congressman to change his enlistment date so they could keep to their plans. Dad never shared much about his experiences, but he did tell me that his deferment saved his life - the base where he was stationed was overrun a month prior to his arrival. In 1997 I made a trip to visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. I saw families and friends of fallen soldiers search for their beloved on the wall, watched them make a keep-sake of that name with a scrap of paper and rubbed charcoal. I took a picture of the book of names to note the fortune of the skip from Robert Floyd Dice to Anthony Dicesare.Several years ago for my father's birthday I wrote him a short story. It was a fictional piece loosely based on what few things he told me about his war experience. I wasn't surprised when I asked him his opinion of the story that his response was, "There sure was a lot of swearing in there." I understand his deflection - I can't imagine how awful it must be for those people that have suffered from war to revisit it to create art. It makes what Tim O'Brien has done with this novel - and others like him throughout the ages - that much more amazing.Final note: after finishing this book I called my father to ask him why, when he returned from the war, he didn't go back to his music career (he became an accountant). He said that after that much time away from practicing and focusing on his craft he would never be able to catch-up. He had a young wife and a family to think about. I'll always wonder now how different things would have been for him. He was blessed to escape from Vietnam without suffering casualty, but has the world suffered from not hearing his beautiful piano playing?
What do You think about Going After Cacciato (1999)?
I don't read military fiction nearly as much as I read military nonfiction, but I had to read a "classic" American novel for 11th-grade English class this year, and the plot sounded interesting, so I gave this a try.So, the book is divided into two parts, there is vignettes of real combat scene's that the platoon is involved in and then there is the ' magic' scenes where they walk through countries and experience lots of things that are metaphors for what's happening in the world.Tim O'Brien uses an elaborate three-part structure to tell the story of Paul Berlin, whereby three intertwined arcs combine to tell a soldier's story. The first arc is the most literal, where Paul Berlin is on night watch in a guard tower while his squad mates sleep. Berlin makes a small yet monumental choice: rather than wake his squad mates to perform their shift, he takes the entire night to keep the watch himself and dreams his story about the road to Paris. This second arc, the Road to Paris, takes place mostly in Berlin's mind--but intentionally begs the question, `what is real and what is imagined.' It begins with a real event, Cacciato's desertion, but after a perfunctory chase that concludes with his lieutenant informing headquarters that Cacciato is missing in action, the events of this narrative take place in Berlin's mind.Shortly after midnight, Berlin wades into the sea and contemplates his guard tower: "an observation post with nothing to observe." What is really under observation is Paul Berlin's experience in the Vietnam War, both how it happened and how it might have happened. Control is a constant motif throughout the novel, whether exerted by Lieutenant Martin ordering the soldiers to certain death in the tunnels, seeking control by chasing Cacciato to return him to the ordered existence of Army life, or the control of Berlin's story.The synopsis says that Tim O'Brien's novels blur the line between reality and fantasy. No line exists in this endeavor. With a few paragraphs at the beginning and a few paragraphs at the end of "Going After Cacciato", the story is entirely a quixotic landscape suspended and book-ended between the fragile (bordering on the shallow) vault of the imagination and the imagination. There are repetitive spelling errors, mainly Vietnamese words (Li Van Ngoc not Li Van Hgoc) and Vietnamese phrases (Mau len not man len), but the rest of the writing flows fluidly, like walking into a dream. Because it is a fictional account (even if it is not fictionalized) of the war, the detailed accounts of the war seem superficial, poorly fleshed out. Insert rice paddy here, a few Vietnamese provinces there, and a M-60, and it would be a cookie cutter account of any war taken in any parts of Asia. I do not think it deserves the National Book Award. Dialogues are definitely the book's strength, but writing on the language level is at best pedestrian. I think a 4 is being generous. Throughout the book I kept on comparing this book strangely to the movie "Harold and Kumar: Go to White Castle." Replace Castle for Paris. Where fantasy instead of bordering on fantasy-- it borders on silly absurdities and tacky weirdness.The book is quite hilarious at times, other times so hallucinatory and dreamlike that portions just barely make sense, but still, a fine read.
—Jerome
I definitely liked the writing style. O'Brien can be very vivid in his description of very short and sometimes disturbing scenes. For most of the book, I thought that was the best part. It easily outdid anything relating to characters or the main storyline.By the end, I think that changes and you see what larger point he was trying to get across. It has to do with the obligations people stick to for poor reasons. The U.S. staying in Vietnam for too long, soldiers searching tunnels when it always gets someone killed, the team following Cacciato way way further than they should have ever considered, and Paul Berlin's final bad decision. I had sympathy for his character till the very end but then he lost all of it. It's bad enough that he chose one more time to go after Cacciato even though it cost him the girl but.. go after the guy that saved your life just so you have a .01% chance of getting to go home without a court martial? Really!?Cacciato is shown with pretty much no negative qualities. He makes decisions in his own interest but at the same time is willing to save his friends/fools that kept trying to follow him. He wasn't obligated to do anything for them but did it anyway. He's free to make the best decisions for himself and others by not being bound to things that no longer make sense. Like the war.
—John
Similar in approach to The Things They Carried, but not nearly as successful, largely because in trying to get around the problem of how to write a war story about a war as metaphysically unhinged as Vietnam, O'Brien settles here on the weary kelson of the hallucinogenic, it-was-all-a-dream plot that, by its very architectonics, evacuates all the drama from the drama and leaves behind little but the words themselves. For a writer like Pynchon, or Joyce, this might succeed. But O'Brien's success in The Things They Carried stems from pathos. That book succeeds by showing how the soldier's pain blurs the factuality of his storytelling, and his inability to tell the straight story of Vietnam heightens that book's dramatic energy, instead of deflating it.
—Andrew
