Word: cacciato
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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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...
...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...
...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...