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Tim O'Brien
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If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home |
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No copies available |
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English |
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| ISBN: |
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0767904435 |
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chris (Japan) (2018/01/25):
20 August 2003 - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
Tim O'Brien is an extraordinarily talented writer. This painful and disturbing memoir of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam, is a vivid and heartfelt chronicle.
O'Brien "grew out of one war and into another." He is the son of a WWII soldier, "who fought the great campaign against the tyrants of the 1940s." His mother served in the WAVES. Drafted in the summer of 1968, "Nam-bound," O'Brien thought the war was "wrongly conceived and poorly justified," and seriously planned to escape to Canada, or to Sweden. However, his entire history of life on the American prairie, the values instilled in him by parents and teachers, pulled him in another direction. In the end, he submitted. "It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite - inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all." Thus, he articulates, so well, the reasons that many of my generation, far less eloquent than he, went silently off to fight a war they did not believe in - and too many never returned.
As a woman from the "Vietnam generation," this book was very painful to read. Yet, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I was still a girl, in so many ways, when Tim O'Brien landed in Vietnam. And he, and our peers, were still boys. I will always feel wonder at their courage - even if they did not feel particularly courageous. How did the regular guys I graduated school with, manage to shoot and be shot at? If there are any answers to my questions about what happened "over there" and why, this book gives me a pretty good idea. I travel into combat with the author, walk over minefields, feel the red earth of Vietnam, as he digs eternal holes to lie in at night. I also feel some of his horror, pain, disillusionment, and admire his dark humor.
O'Brien writes beautifully, with great sensitivity, of that terrible time. "Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."
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http://bookmooch.com/0767904435 |
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