Word: cacciato
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...there and who was not. Westmoreland and LBJ were not there--they dreamed of conquering Gaul. Tim O'Brien, the ex-infantryman and former Washington Post reporter who is the author of this fine novel was, and wondering why he had not gotten on the bus to Canada. And Cacciato was marching the 8,600 statute miles that lie between the Laotian border and Paris. Paris, France...
...Cacciato is the goofy kid who fishes the Lake Country, a bombed-out region where the shellholes are filled only with dirty water and corpses, or worse, pieces of them. His courage is not in question; the Company remembers how Cacciato got the Silver Star for shooting a Viet Cong in the teeth. But one day the goofy kid checks out, marching to Paris, and the squad is sent to bring him back--Paul Berlin, Doc Paret, Oscar Johnson, the Lieutenant, and the rest--but in Paris they lose him, just as they lost him all along the way. This...
...novel proceeds on three complex, interlocking levels: the chase after Cacciato on the road to Paris: flashbacks that are among the best writing in the book--some of the best American writing of combat since Hemingway--and finally, Paul Berlin's thoughts one night at the observation tower where he is on guard. For Berlin, the issue comes down to courage...
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...