Going After Cacciato
by Tim O'Brien
Summary
Cacciato, a round faced, dim, sweet natured private, walks away from the war. He leaves a note, more or less: gone to Paris. On the map it is some eight thousand miles from Quang Ngai, and Third Squad is sent up the trail after him, which is where the novel performs its founding move: somewhere in the first mountains, the pursuit leaves the war and keeps going, through Laos, Mandalay, Delhi, Tehran and Zagreb, all the way to a hotel room in Paris, a chase that cannot be happening and is described with the same mud level realism as the firefights.
The dreamer is Paul Berlin, the squad's frightened, decent everyman, standing six hours of night watch in an observation post by the South China Sea, and the book braids three strands: the imagined journey to Paris, the tower through the night, and the true war remembered in fragments, the deaths of the men of Third Squad, one by one, each arriving like a stone dropped in the fantasy. A Vietnamese refugee, Sarkin Aung Wan, joins the imagined caravan as Berlin's love and his conscience, and the Paris the squad finally reaches contains a negotiating table where Berlin must argue, against her, the case for going back.
The engine of it all is the question the book never stops asking: what is courage, and is wanting to run the opposite of it or the heart of it?
Around three hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the Vietnam novel where imagination itself is the battlefield, the bridge between the war's reporting and its myths.
Historical Context & Significance
Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979, beating, among others, John Irving's The World According to Garp, an upset that fixed its reputation: the war's fiction had come of age. Tim O'Brien had carried a rifle with the Americal Division in Quang Ngai, the province of My Lai, and had already published the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone; this was the imagination's answer to the same material.
Critics reached for magical realism, then a new import, though O'Brien has always insisted the book is realistic about the one thing it documents exactly, the way a soldier's mind actually works on watch: memory, dread and daydream running simultaneously.
The Things They Carried followed in 1990, the story cycle that became a fixture of American classrooms, and the two volumes now stand together, the novel of the war's imagination and the book of its memory, the twin peaks of Vietnam fiction.