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Ebook220 pages3 hours
If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
By Tim O'Brien
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of The Things They Carried
"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."
—Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.
Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.
"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."
—Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.
Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.
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Author
Tim O'Brien
TIM O’BRIEN received the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer Finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing.
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Reviews for If I Die in a Combat Zone
Rating: 3.6666666666666665 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
3 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5a military memoir of Tim O'Brien's tour of duty in the Vietnam War.....a year as a foot soldier in Vietnam
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For me, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is the most powerful book that I have every read and it's the standard against which I judge all things O'Brien. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien plays with nonlinear and fragmented narrative structure, magical realism, and the power of storytelling to capture the visceral truth that telling the real story can't quite capture. For O'Brien, we must sometimes turn to fiction to capture what is "emotionally true" and, in doing so, be less concerned with an objective reality. In a way, If I Die in a Combat Zone makes this point for him. Written 15 years before Things, If I Die is a memoir of Tim O'Brien's experience in the Vietnam War. There is no metafiction razzle-dazzle, but rather a straight-forward, linear narrative that begins when O'Brien is drafted and ends as he boards the Freedom Bird headed toward home. It's powerful stuff, but not nearly as powerful as his fiction work. Despite that, anything by Tim O'Brien is better than almost anything else out there--fiction or non-fiction. Having grown up in the post-World War II glow of American military might, O'Brien grew up in the ask-no-questions patriotic culture of the Midwest. Real men were expected to fight. Real men were supposed to look forward to war. Real men craved the opportunity to serve their country and protect their families. O'Brien doesn't reject these values, but these views are complicated by his natural philosophical inclinations. He questions the nature of bravery, as well as how American intervention in Vietnam is protecting the average American's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the aftermath, he's left with no certain answers: "Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry . . . Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme? . . . Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." And that's what O'Brien does in the novel--he tells war stories. He tells of the tedious days of repetition, punctuated by brief bursts of action; he tells of military incompetence and the frustration of not knowing who the enemy is in a land where farmers by day picked up guns at night; he tells of how cruel being sent on R&R was, knowing the brief return to normality would not last. And he does all of this without being preachy; he simply shows us what life was like for the average soldier and leaves us to draw our own conclusions. His language is at once poetic and precise, getting to the heart of all things. No one can capture the peculiar mix of fear, adrenaline fed excitement, and remorse of a soldier's most introspective moments like O'Brien. At one point, O'Brien ruminates on Ernest Hemingway's fascination with war: "Some say Ernest Hemingway was obsessed by the need to show bravery in battle. It started, they say, somewhere in World War I and ended when he passed his final test in Idaho. If the man was obsessed with the notion of courage, that was a fault. But, reading Hemingway's war journalism and his war stories, you get the sense that he was simply concerned about bravery, hence about cowardice, and that seems a virtue, a sublime and profound concern that few men have." It's a concern that permeates all of O'Brien's work and his treatment of it is indeed sublime.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a brief but interesting war story of O'Brian's year as a rifleman in the infantry in Vietnam. This is much better than the lamentable "And a Hard Rain Fell" but not as good as "Dispatches" by Michael Herr, in my opinion. O'Brian seems to fancy himself as a writer, which is rather optimistic, and his discussion of the nature of courage is not particularly useful.Unfortunately, I'm still searching for the Vietnam war's equivalent of "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer or "Storm of Steel" by Ernst Junger.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The stories are not as good as some other Vietnam memoirs, but the writing is excellent.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A powerful book detailing the author's experience in Vietnam. Tim O'Brien writes in a literary manner as he relives his time as an infantryman during the Vietnam conflict and the characters he met there. Pervading the novel is a sense of the wasted sacrifice of those soldiers who died fighting an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere and the relief on those like the writer who survived the war to return home to a changed America which did not appreciate their service.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read this in college, so I have forgotten the details, but I remember it being a very good book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A US soldier's memoir of his tour of duty in the Vietnam conflict. I didn't understand some of the literary references but the authour doesn't shy away from the horrors that he saw or his reactions to having to kill people he doesn't hate or know. He struggles through his time in this conflict that he doesn't believe in and comes into conflict with higher officers about his opinions. A sobering read from a veteran who was lucky to come home with all of his limbs in one piece
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I really wanted to love this, because I love Tim O'Brien generally. But, I came away from this feeling like I had just listened to a bunch of random war stories about Vietnam and going to Vietnam, which I know was the point of the book. I guess it made it feel a bit cliched - at this point, we've heard all this before, but it was probably more shocking or new at the time it was written. I also think he took the whole idea of storytelling much further with "The Things They Carried." Those were also many random vignettes, but they added up to the common theme of the exploration of what the word "truth" means. For me, this book didn't add up to much. Also the narrator had a really annoying Eeyore voice, so that didn't help.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If I Die in a Combat Zone - Tim O'Brien ***Somehow this book has become known as one of the most important personal accounts to have been written about the war in Vietnam. It is a firsthand experience of Tim O’Brien, a person that although he never really wanted to, found himself signing up the military to fight overseas. I have read a number of novels from this genre (the one that most sticks in my mind is ‘Once a Warrior King’) but had never come across this book before. There are plenty of favourable reviews and they are probably right, but when I pick up these types of books I read them to find out about the events, the action, the hardships & although this may not be very pc, I want all the gory details so I can become immersed in the time and place. This book offered very little in this way of content. I suppose I can’t really blame the author for that, the blame should fall with the publisher and almost a sense of false advertising, it should have really been described as ‘One man’s thoughts and philosophies on the Vietnam war’. I had a feeling that O’Brien started off wanting to tell the reader how pointless war really is and then got carried away with his own self importance, of which I really could care less about. To be honest it got a bit on the boring side and many a time I felt like shouting ‘get to the facts’.... Pages are donated to Socrates and poetry, and I always got the feeling that the Author felt himself superior to the other soldiers fighting alongside him.There are other books by the author out there but I doubt very much if I will pick them up, maybe I will be missing out some great literature, but I am more than willing to take that chance.