If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
by Tim O'Brien
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tim O'BrienEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-01
ISBN: 0767904435
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Book Review: "I want to go to Vietnam; Just to kill ol' Charlie Cong..."
Summary: 5 Stars
This is O'Brien's first book, written as the Vietnam War (American version) still raged, and I consider it his best. The authenticity of the American soldier's experience in the war permeates the book, and he did not need to embellish the stories with some of the "magic realism" that he used in later works. I also gave "The Things They Carried" a solid 5-stars but felt that the quality of some of the stories in that work was uneven; particularly such stories as "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." The title to this book, as well as my subject line to my review are derived from the song fragments that the drill instructors made you sing in basic training. As O'Brien says, if you want to understand how the massacre at My Lai happened, you need to look at the "training" of the soldiers who went to the war. O'Brien has several excellent chapters on the "training," which is primarily composed of psychological methods to de-humanize the one-time civilian and transform him (when it was males who were drafted) into an automaton who follows orders blindly.
For the vast majority of readers who were not in the war, I think it helps to realize that O'Brien's own experience represented a slender, but the most essential aspect of the war. The vast majority of the soldiers who were there, which peaked at more than half a million per year, were not in the infantry. At most, 15% had experiences like O'Brien. Furthermore, he was there during the waning days of American ground combat, 1969-70, and within a year virtually all such operations would cease, though the war would drag on for another four years. By then all the soldiers were cynical about the prospects of "winning," and only hoped to last out their 12 months, preferably in the rear, if that could be arranged. And O'Brien was in an area, Quang Ngai province, which received virtually no press coverage, until, that is, a courageous photographer retain a few rolls of film, delivered them to the media, exposing the massacre which occurred at My Lai. O'Brien took part in patrols around My Lai, but more than a year after the massacre. On these patrols, O'Brien and his fellow soldiers were also bedeviled by the mines which were a catalyst for the most famous massacre of the war.
My year in Vietnam commenced six months prior to O'Brien's and I was only 50-100 km south of him, in Binh Dinh province. I was in a tank unit, and we did conduct combined operations with infantry, so the story told in Chapter 17, "July" was haunting, since it covered one of the most unfortunate aspects of any war -- being killed by your own men or equipment, and in this chapter, some of the infantry were run over by the "APC," (Armored Personnel Carriers) during a joint operation.
O'Brien was a "college boy," one who was well-read, and brought the world of books to his experiences there, with philosophical discussions on the meaning of courage and perspectives from Hemingway to Homer. He opposed the war before his arrival, supported McCarthy for President, had read Bernard Fall on the French War in Vietnam, and had read Graham Greene's quintessential "The Quiet American." Regrettably, he apparently had not read Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," which is the anti-war novel I believe this collection of non-fiction stories most closely resembles. They both covered the training, and the actual combat; the enormous disparity in a soldier's life between the "front" and the "rear" areas; the matter of dumb blind luck as to who survives and who doesn't; and the extreme variability in the competence of the officers. Unlike Remarque's war though, which was primarily army against army, Vietnam, as well as Afghanistan today represents warfare in and amongst a civilian population that will remain, long after the Americans are gone.
The portrait of Major Callicles is brilliant. The Major represents the old "brown-boot" Army, from Korea and the hey-day of Germany during the late `50's. In Vietnam his world truly disintegrated, as he saw "his" Army collapse in a hopeless struggle for the so-called hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, and the draftees who fought in the war chose a different drug than the alcohol that sustained the Major. And there was the very real discipline the troops imposed on the officer corps; the "fragging" of officers who were too gung-ho, needlessly endangering the lives of the troops they commanded.
The classic accounts of the Vietnam War were primarily written by journalists, from Stanley Karnow to Neil Sheehan. In these books, as is appropriate, much coverage is given to the political leadership in America and Vietnam, and the rationale behind various decisions. Saigon is not even mentioned in this book, and it is unlikely if O'Brien, just like me, ever saw the city during the entire year. Other "grunts" have written about their experiences in the infantry, but O'Brien's account will always remain the best of the Vietnam War. A solid 5-stars.
Summary of If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.Over time, Tim O'Brien has used both art and artifice to shape his fictional accounts of Vietnam. Award-winning novels such as Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried offer up a surreal view of the war: a soldier who decides to walk to Paris, leaving only a trail of M&M's in his wake; a young man who imports his high-school girlfriend to his base camp high in the jungled mountains, only to lose her to a shadowy squad of Special Forces Green Berets and to "that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure" that was Vietnam. O'Brien's first account of the war, however, was written in the raw, unfiltered months following his return from Southeast Asia in 1969. If I Die in a Combat Zone has all of the eloquence and attention to language and detail that are a mark of the author's work; what is different about it is its straightforward, unembellished depiction of his personal experience of hell.
"When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville--GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai ... you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine."
O'Brien paints an unvarnished portrait of the infantry soldier's life that is at once mundane and terrifying--the endless days of patrolling punctuated by firefights that end as suddenly and inconclusively as they begin; the mind-numbing brutality of burned villages and trampled rice patties; the terror of tunnels, minefields, and the ever-present threat of death. Powerful as these scenes are, perhaps the most memorable chapter in the book concerns his decision to desert just a few weeks before he was sent to Vietnam. "The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't.... I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them, too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run." Tim O'Brien went into the war opposing it and came out knowing exactly why. If I Die in a Combat Zone is more than just a memoir of a disastrous war; it is also a meditation on heroism and cowardice, on the mutability of truth and morality in a war zone and, most of all, on the simple, human capacity to endure the unendurable. --Alix Wilber
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