Why this book: A good friend and currently active-duty SEAL officer and I agreed to read some literature related to our chosen profession.  I had read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and liked it, and attended a lecture at which he spoke about his book, his life, his thoughts – and I was impressed. My wife Mary Anne just read another of O’Brien’s  books If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box me up and Ship me home, and thought it was well done  – reminding me of a decision I’d made a couple of years ago to read more of Tim O’Brien’s work. Cacciato  is the book that brought him into national prominence by winning the National Book  Award, less than a decade after the Vietnam War, the setting in which this story takes place.

My impressions:  Going After Cacciato is a fascinating read, creatively written, and it kept me on my toes throughout.  For the first half (or more) I wondered  where it was going – and then for a while, I thought I knew, and at the end, was again surprised.  It is very broad in scope.  I have described it to friends as a cross between Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, and 100 Years of Solitude, in a context similar to Saving Private Ryan.  Let me explain.

Saving Private Ryan:  On a very superficial level, the book is about a squad of soldiers trying to find one guy- in this case Cacciato, who went AWOL while serving with his squad in Vietnam. Similar to Private  Ryan, the reader and the soldiers involved sense the absurdity of taking so much effort and assuming so much risk for one guy in the midst of a crazy war, in which there is so much death.

 Catch 22:  In both Cacciato and Catch 22 we experience the absurd consequences of attempts to maintain some of the order and discipline of civilized life in the chaos and craziness of war, how those who enforce regulations meant to maintain order, can create so much havoc and chaos, and the sometimes bizarre unintended consequences that result when short-sighted people try to impose regulations on creative soldiers in an un-regulatable context.   The clever ones exploit the system to get what they want, others are victims, and many more, like Yossarian in Catch 22 and Paul Berlin in Cacciato, and most of us in our own lives, simply try to survive and get what we can, as we are  swept along by events we don’t fully understand, trying to make sense of it all….

Slaughterhouse Five: The protagonist in Cacciato, Paul Berlin, reminded me a lot of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, confused, unfocused, feeling like a leaf in the wind of events blowing him around, trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense, while also trying to do his job and survive.  All the while, others around him are fully engaged in the craziness of what is happening around them, never in question, never in doubt.  Paul Berlin (like Billy Pilgrim) seems to be the most self-aware person in the world he inhabits, and we wonder if this is more a curse than blessing.  In both Slaughterhouse Five and Cacciato,  the reader shares the protagonist’s confusion about the chronology of events, and what is REALLY going on.

100 Years of Solitude: The line between fact and fancy, between reality and dream becomes blurred.  We are not sure when the narrative shifts from what “really” happened, to what might have happened, to what probably didn’t happen, but is interesting to think about – when the author is taking s0-called real events in the story, and spinning them into fantastic and yet intriguing, provocative, and inspiring possibilities.

On the book jacket, someone is quoted as saying “To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby Dick a novel about whales.”  I didn’t really get this until 3/4 of the way through the book – when I saw how the scope of this novel was much larger than I had realized.   The fantasy that is built into the book allows the author to take the readers into contexts and environments other than the Vietnam war, and we recognized courage, cowardice, fear, love, compassion, integrity, confusion and disingenuousness that we know in ourselves and our own lives.

Toward the end, the author asks us to imagine Paul Berlin sitting at a table on stage in a theater with a young woman who had become his lover.  We are asked to listen to the two of them negotiate whether and how they would move forward together, based on their very different needs. I thought O’Brien brilliantly described a classic challenge that nearly every couple faces in struggling with the tensions between obligations to each other and duties to others.

This book won the National Book Award for a reason – it is a creatively written novel about a war  – but the scope is so much broader and takes the reader geographically from Vietnam to Paris and psychologically from the war in Vietnam, to a bizarre Odyssey, to our own lives.

A few quotes that I found provocative and meaningful that may help to give a sense of the book (page numbers from the paperback edition Broadway books 1999):

“Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination.”  26

“The real issue is the power of will to defeat fear….somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse,that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be.”  81

“But the lieutenant knew that in war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose.”    166

“He was a professional soldier, but unlike other professionals he believed that the overriding mission was the inner mission, the mission of every man to learn  the important things about himself.”  166

“Unreal, he thought. Just a creature of his own making – blink and she was gone – but even so he liked the way she closed her eyes to the music, the way her chrome cross bounced on her sweater, her braided hair swishing so full.”  202

“What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember.”  206

“And then, with the war ended, history decided, he would explain to her why he had let himself go to war.  Not because of strong convictions, but because he didn’t know.  He didn’t know who was right, or what was right; he didn’t know if it was a war of self-determination or self-destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he didn’t know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn’t know if nations would topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he didn’t know who really started the war or why or when, or with what motives; he did not know if it mattered….he didn’t know where truth lay….”  264

“They did not know even the simple things… they did not know how to feel… they did not know good from evil.”  270

“‘Paris is not a place. It is a state of mind.’  Paul Berlin smiled, but secretly he hoped it was  more than that.” 298

“He tried to imagine it differently, he tried hard, but the power to make a wish was no longer the power to make it happen. It was a failure of imagination.”  313