Summary Of Tim O Brien's Going After Cacciato

Going After Cacciato – The Night March

Tim O’Brien is an American born writer from Austin Minnesota. Born in 1946 he was the right age to receive a draft notice for the Vietnam War. Like many other Americans during this time he was against the war but still served his county after he graduated from Macalester College as an army foot solider. During his army career, he also received the Purple Heart while as an Infantryman on the front lines. Upon coming home from the war, he attended Harvard to become a newspaper reporter. However, he would shortly leave Harvard to work as an intern at the Washington Post in Washington D.C. This internship would pave his way as a fiction writer. O’Brien is a significant influence on American literary history,

Published in January of 1978 O’Brien’s novel Going after Cacciato tells the story of a soldier who decides to leave his squad in Vietnam and go to Paris. Chapter thirty-one in Going after Cacciato – Night March gives introduces us to the life of a soldier where “the platoon of thirty-two soldiers moved slowly in the dark, single file, not talking. One by one, like sheep n a dream, hey passed through the hedgerow, crossed quietly over a meadow and came down to the paddy” (O’Brien p. 208). We learn what it is like to be a solider in the Vietnam War, some are excited and some are afraid. These men are tired from the march they were just one and looking forward to getting to the sea where they believe they will be safe. There is no talking or jokes being made – just thirty-one soldiers. As we learn the life of these soldiers we meet Private First Class Paul Berlin who is afraid and does not want to be in this war. “His eyes were closed. He was pretending he was not in the war. Pretending he had not watched Billy Boy Watkins die of fright on the field of battle” (O’Brien p. 208). Pretending you are not in a war and being a boy again makes this novel real. This novel showed readers what it was like to be an American soldier, watching other soldiers and your friends die on the battlefield. War was real and memories of home, day dreaming of times

We learn what it was like to be a solider in the Vietnam War. What is was like during this time for these soldiers who were fighting a war while keeping themselves literary sane when they watch other soldiers die from the conflicts of war as well as natural causes. You see the realism of wear and what it is like to be a solder in the Vietnam War. These soldiers are fighting an inner battle with themselves that is still fought today when soldiers are fighting in a war. Going after Cacciato focuses on the life of a solider and what can bring a solider to the breaking point that they must walk away and risk it all. We learn that not everyone deals with life in the same way. We laugh, cry, or stay silent – sitting back watching others basically “fall apart” or “crack under the pressure” while trying to hold it all together. If any soldier should have gone AWOL it should have been Berlin, we saw how he handled Billy Bob’s death but in the end, it was Cacciato who honestly couldn’t take the pressure and ended up going AWOL and Berlin risking his life to find him. O’Brien brought the war to the Homefront in this story and regardless if you supported it or not there were soldiers there fighting their own battles, away from loved ones – that spent the only free time they had daydreaming of home. We can read Going after Cacciato today, almost forty years after it was written, and still understand learn