Going After Cacciato

In Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato the theater of war becomes the theater of the absurd as a private deserts his post in Vietnam, intent on walking 8,000 miles to Paris for the peace talks. The remaining members of his squad are sent after him, but what happens then is anybody's guess: "The facts were simple: They went after Cacciato, they chased him into the mountains, they tried hard. They cornered him on a small grassy hill. They surrounded the hill. They waited through the night. And at dawn they shot the sky full of flares and then they moved in.... That was the end of it. The last known fact. What remained were possibilities."

It is these possibilities that make O'Brien's National Book Award-winning novel so extraordinary. Told from the perspective of squad member Paul Berlin, the search for Cacciato soon enters the realm of the surreal as the men find themselves following an elusive trail of chocolate M&M's through the jungles of Indochina, across India, Iran, Greece, and Yugoslavia to the streets of Paris. The details of this hallucinatory journey alternate with feverish memories of the war--men maimed by landmines, killed in tunnels, engaged in casual acts of brutality that would be unthinkable anywhere else. Reminiscent of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Going After Cacciato dishes up a brilliant mix of ferocious comedy and bleak horror that serves to illuminate both the complex psychology of men in battle and the overarching insanity of war. --Alix Wilber

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All Customer Reviews
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About the Power of the Human Imagination, 2008-09-05
As a huge Tim O'Brien fan, who has read everything he has written, I still think that Going After Cacciato is his best book (although The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods provide stiff competition). Cacciato tells the story of Paul Berlin, an ordinary, decent man who tries to do the best he can amid the horrific circumstances he finds himself in in Vietnam. Berlin is lost and frightened at the war. He has witnessed the traumatic deaths of several fellow soldiers. One night, in an observation post by the sea, Berlin imagines his platoon undertaking a long, complex journey after a simple-minded soldier named Cacciato who has abandoned the war--who has simply walked away, intending to hike all the way to Paris.

The novel's chapters alternate between 3 narrative realities: Berlin's disturbing memories of the war, which he tries hard to suppress, the present time which is the night on the observation tower, and the imagined pursuit after Cacciato. It might take readers a while to catch on that the Cacciato chapters take place only in Paul Berlin's imagination. He tries hard to make the platoon's journey after the AWOL soldier as realistic and convincing as he can. But when the men tumble down an underground system of tunnels, falling and falling like Alice down the rabbit hole, readers realize that something odd is going on.

As the night on the observation post progresses, Berlin's most troubling memories arise to wrest control of the story that he is inventing in his head. Fact and fiction begin to bleed together, as they do in O'Brien's later novel, The Things They Carried. Despite Paul Berlin's best attempts to organize his thoughts into a logical, chronological story, the disorder and chaos of the war intrude and shape Berlin's imagined story.

This novel is about much more than the Vietnam War, although it does a great job of depicting the day-to-day life of the ordinary soldier in the war memory scenes. It is a novel that is, finally, about the power of the human imagination. The novel asks whether the imagination is strong enough to overcome atrocity, to create new endings to old stories, to dream up a way out of war itself. While the ending remains ambiguous, O'Brien explores these questions in a beautiful and heartbreaking way.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

The Best Novel of the Viet Nam War, 2008-03-27
With this novel, Tim O'Brien captured the spirit of the frustration, camadarie and confusion of the war in Viet Nam as seen by the foot soldier. Cacciato, the protagonist of the novel becomes the driving force of a quixotic attempt to rescue him desertion. In the loyalty of the platoon, the care of one in the relationship to all, mark this novel.

At once surreal, graphic and hyper realistic, Going After Cacciato is a book that marked Tim O'Brien as a major American writer. His depictions of the carpet bombed former jungles, the mindless, twisted jungles, and the trek of the platoon as it chases Cacciato across two continents will rewards its reader.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

One Strange Book - O'Brien Captures the Pointlessness, 2007-10-17
Contrary to an NYT review,'Going After Cacciato' by Tim O'Brien is indeed a book about war and the men fighting it (leave it to the Times to say something so silly and get away with it). Or, well, it's a book about war until Cacciato walks away from it and then his platoon follows - to Paris. And of course, his escape from the war was about the war, too.

O'Brien flashes back and forth between the real events of the war that happened in the past, the 'trip', and the 'after trip'. I will leave to the reader to figure out whether the trip 'really' takes place or not. The book has a Catch-22 feel to it, but that book was closer to reality as it portrayed the insanity of war. O'Brien does capture the pointlessness of the Vietnam war - that is, it was pointless from the perspective of the US soldiers not to the Vietnamese.

O'Brien wrote the Cacciato book in 1979 after he published his memoirs If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home in which he discusses his plan to go AWOL that he did not carry through on. In that sense, Cacciato carries out the plan for him.

Cacciato is a strange book, but in 1979, most people in the US were sick of anything to do with Vietnam; a novel of historical realism would have lacked appeal. I did not fight in Vietnam, being just a bit too young, but I think O'Brien captures the bizarre surrealness that soldiers experienced in being dropped in the middle of a land about as foreign and exotic to an American 18-year-old as you could find to fight a war nobody understood.




0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Leaving a War, 2007-05-31
Cacciato walks away from the war, away from Vietnam. He has an atlas and is determined to go to Paris - across India and Persia, through Greece. You know the way. The lieutenant takes his squad and follows him, determined to bring him back.

This is a surreal journey through the countryside of imagination and through the minds of unwilling participants in a senseless war. This is a hazy hallucination, a drug induced introspection, a rambling question without answer. It's a very good book as well. O'Brien captures the mood of Vietnam and its dangers and the simple desires of men who don't want to die, who don't want to climb down into tunnels. His brief sentences and exquisite pacing bring this world alive for the reader.

Going After Cacciato is a fantasy escape from reality, a shared dream of American men in an unfriendly land. It's prompted by the excesses of brutality and the fear that never stops - heart racing always on guard, never safe - the fear that causes men to wish for an easier mission in an easier land.

Well worth the time to read this. To understand that war heroes and combat veterans don't want to be either.

- CV Rick


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

a mix of realism and fantasy, 2007-05-07
Going After Cacciato has some astonishingly harsh, violent observations about war and the men who fight them, but for a "war" novel it has a surprisingly deft touch. There are moving passages about love and friendship, home and domestic life. Really, the full range of human expression about life is explored in this novel, and not merely the situational elements of Vietnam. The imaginative passages of chasing Cacciato becomes for O'Brien an escape valve for the war, a way to play out, in a vast space of complete possibility, what war and peace mean, and its ultimate cost on the people who wage it.

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