Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fine "On the Ground View", 30 May 2001
By A Customer
This is not a history book, tactics and plans are not discussed. This is a book of survival, survival of a naïve individual who quickly gets the fastest lesson in maturity required - infantry soldier war. O'Brien's book is riveting reading, it is basic and direct, it quickly knocks any glory to be had in being in Vietnam. This is a book of survival, one were friendships can end quickly. O'Brien does not ask for sympathy he only appears to want the reader to try and understand what it is was like for the common GI.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Apocalypse Wow!, 10 Aug 2000
By A Customer
The horror... the horror... it's Vietnam, the way it was, and perhaps also the way we imagine it to have been, through the lens of films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, only this is the (semi-fictionalised) account of Tim O'Brien's tour of duty through the madness of what is generally thought of as the first rock n' roll war. There is pain and suffering in his account, interspersed with the exhilaration of still being alive as each day brings him that one step closer to returning home. Tim's book reads fast and furious and is probably one of the finest examples of its genre.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An OK account of the Vietnam experience - but it fails to convince, 23 Oct 2006
"Nobody has written about the Vietnam War with more eloquence than Tim O'Brien." So says the quote from the Washington Star on the book's cover, going on to add, "[this] may be the greatest piece of work to come out of Vietnam." I don't know when that review was penned but I suspect it was pretty soon after the book was first published in 1973. I say that because there are now no shortage of works of both fiction and non-fiction (and some in between - 13th Valley) which write at least as eloquently about Vietnam and, in my opinion, are greater pieces of work on the subject.
O'Brien objected to the war in Vietnam, even going as far as to map out detailed plans for an escape to a neutral country during his first leave from basic training. He says, in the brief interview transcribed at the back of the book, that 'If I Die...' is about, "...the daily brutalities...that were the consequences of abstract political ideas gone haywire." The book then is supposed to be an exploration of the rightness of the US's involvement in the Vietnam war in particular, and the rightness of any nation builders' involvement in any military capacity in general. O'Brien is obviously of the opinion that it is inherently wrong and flawed, and seems to think that just laying his day to day experiences of being a footsoldier on a tour in Vietnam before us is all the evidence he needs to convince the reader.
Personally I am more of the opinion that the 'daily brutalities' he describes in the book are more compelling evidence of the general poor quality and malaise that was endemic amongst the young generation of draftees during Vietnam than it was evidence of any nation's policies. An old-school WWII veteran, Major Callicles, who takes over O'Brien's company towards the end of his tour makes just such a point. O'Brien's army unit were deployed into the My Lai area of operations - just a year after the infamous Pinkville massacre. Callicles was irked by the laziness, pot smoking, whoring, long hair, racial divisions and basic absence of professionalism he saw around him, claiming disaffected and unprofessional soldiering was to more blame for My Lai: Pinkville wouldn't have happened in WWII.
Now I don't know if that's true; I wouldn't be surprised if similar US atrocities can be highlighted in WWII or Korea or elsewhere. But I'm afraid Tim O'Brien's account graphically confirms what a shambles the troops and their officers were at that time, and it's difficult not to suspect that much of the behaviour that O'Brien is describing is due to dreadful soldiering rather than misguided policy as he tries to show. O'Brien's unit were hopeless - preferring to radio in phantom sit-reps and even artillery missions from the security of their base than to go out patrolling aggressively. Even when they did patrol, they ignored noise and light discipline, dumped essential kit they couldn't be bothered to carry, didn't bother with listening posts, routinely fell asleep on watch and prefered to use human shields for insurance against night infiltration than to set up proper defensive positions. When going out on patrol the last thing they wanted to do was make contact with VC, preferring instead to use grenades or, better and more indiscriminate still, napalm than to risk prying too closely into suspect villages and trails. The result was that, in concentrating on self defense and preservation above all else, they shambled grudgingly around their AO just getting picked off by booby traps and snipers and, paradoxically, had an appalling casualty rate as a result.
The overwhelming impression I got from the book - which is an OK, if brief read - is not what horrible folly war is as O'Brien intended. Of course war is a catastrophic folly, but 'If I Die in a Combat Zone' was not proof of that (Phil Caputo's 'A Rumor of War' achieves that much more stylishly and convincingly). The overwhelming impression I got from the book was just how hopeless, moribund and wracked with self-fulfilling fear of the enemy (and we're talking a plain unwillingness to fight rather than any widely held political or moral objections) a certain section of the 1960s American draft generation were.
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