Word: cacciato
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There have been other admirable Viet Nam books recently: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters and Frederick Downs' The Killing Zone. Josiah Bunting, a novelist (The Lionheads) and former Army officer who served in Viet Nam and is now president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, points out an anomaly of Viet Nam. "The Norman Mailers and William Styrons and all those guys stayed at Harvard for this war. The real literary genius never went." Nonetheless, Bunting expects that "within the next three or five years, there will...
Students frequently check out novels on the Vietnam war, such as "Going After Cacciato" by Tim O'Brien and books by women authors such as "On Photography" by Susan Sontag, Jane R. Morhardt, assistant librarian at Lamont Library, said last week...
Berlin is a survivor, a competent soldier who doesn't care much for soldiering, the man who escapes the daily horror by wandering after Cacciato to Paris. The epigram that starts the book--"Soldiers are dreamers," by Siegfried Sassoon--reminds us that they are, from Cacciato to Berlin, yes, even to Westmoreland, sitting in Saigon wanting to be another Grant, forgetting how Grant won battles: by throwing wave after wave of young men against the fire...
...part of a decade--the Saigon police chief with his gun to the head of a suspect, Buddhist monks on fire in the streets of Hue, the little napalmed girl running in terror down a rural road. And so Paul Berlin, and one suspects O'Brien too, goes after Cacciato...
...along the trail there are glimpses of Cacciato, as he helps the squad out of trouble, until the final ending in Paris where the squad is left essentially where they started: without Cacciato, leaderless, without a sense of mission. The man who laughed has slipped away again, and Paul Berlin, left with his sense of obligation, climbs down from the observation tower to go back to the senseless war. Michael Herr relates in Dispatches the story of passing a blind man on a New York street with a friend who was a medic in Vietnam. Around the man's neck...