Review: Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Title: Going After Cacciato

Author: Tim O’Brien

Publisher: Broadway Books

Year: 1978

Going After Cacciato is largely considered to be one of the best, if not the best novel to come out of the Vietnam War. In his 1978 review for the New York Times, I think Richard Freedman said it better than I could ever hope to. “To call Going After Cacciato a book about war,” he wrote, “is like calling Moby Dick a book about whales”. Going After Cacciato, winner of the National Book Award in 1979, is the third book of O’Brien’s I have read in the last year, the others being If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried. To put it quite simply, anything he writes, I will read. Repeatedly.

Personally speaking, I know very little about the literature that came out of Vietnam. It started before I was born and ended before I was 10 years old. In fact, what I do know, can be attributed almost entirely to Tim O’Brien and Hollywood. Oh, I have seen the news specials, and the bits and pieces on the History Channel. And I have seen the romanticized Hollywood accounts of brave men charging into battle. But I have never felt as though I discovering something unique and essential about this particular war. I have nothing at all to base it on, but I always knew that there was something missing from each of these versions. That bit of something missing is what O’Brien explores.

He may tell the story of a squad pursuing an AWOL soldier fleeing on foot 8,600 miles from Vietnam to Paris, but that isn’t what O’Brien is writing about. Cacciato’s flight and the squad’s pursuit is a reflection of one man’s take on the war. It is a detailed telling of O’Brien’s experience. Obviously not the factual experience, but the emotional and psychological truth that exists beyond, and often in spite of the facts.

Much like in his other work, O’Brien explores the differences between truth, fact, and reality. Using the situation of Cacciato’s desertion, he maintains the fact of the pursuit throughout the novel while evolving the truth of the intentions behind that pursuit. And with the change in intentions comes a blurring of good and evil, and an almost constant lack of understanding and commitment to anything other than the overall mission of capturing Cacciato, until the pursuers become the pursued.

It isn’t at all uncommon to see O’Brien’s work referred to as “Anti-Vietnam” and he has been referred to as Marxist and unpatriotic, even criminal. But these references, I think, are made without an accurate understanding of what O’Brien’s point is when he tells the story of Paul Berlin and the chase of and search for Cacciato. Whether or not O’Brien was for or against the war simply isn’t the point. What matters to O’Brien is the view of the war from the bottom of the chain of command. It’s the unedited view he is interested in exploring. The view with no top-down, “big picture” understanding of the daily events that he lived as an infantryman along the Song Tra Bong.

Going After Cacciato isn’t, in my opinion, on par with his latest book, The Things They Carried, but it is, really, a different kind of exploration of the Vietnam War. In Going After Cacciato, O’Brien jumps down the rabbit hole, in a way, and shows a side of war seldom seen in today’s mainstream media. It’s a crisp, authentic, sometimes brutal look at not just war, but the physical and psychological effects war has on those serving on the front lines. Most importantly, I think, the story O’Brien tells is just as entertaining as it is eye opening, and I can’t wait for the next of his books to work it’s way to the top of my reading list.