Staff Pick - Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

[Brian Bess]

An Imaginative AWOL

A soldier named Cacciato leaves his battalion in the jungles of Vietnam in October 1968. He had told another soldier, Paul Berlin, that he was going to walk to Paris. The lieutenant gives the order for the men to go after the soldier, Cacciato, before he gets too far. Cacciato had seemed to everyone like a near idiot, with a vacant smile almost always on his face. However, Cacciato is smart enough to elude the men in his pursuit, climbing a mountain and then setting off a smoke bomb to obscure their view while he slips into the jungle. The men keep going, finding signs of Cacciato, abandoned tins of food, a bag…and keep going farther west…all the way to Paris.

Unlikely and improbable? Most definitely, but it is the waking dream of Paul Berlin. The novel is told from Berlin’s point of view, and each step along the way is punctuated by chapters titled “The Observation Post”, a location in the future possibly or perhaps before the pursuit of Cacciato, in which Berlin has guard duty while the others sleep, providing him with the elevated vantage point above the world, next to the sea and the sounds of seagulls, the balcony of his consciousness from which he analyzes his and his fellow soldiers’ prospects, ponders the options he may have had but didn’t take, essentially assessing his state of mind.

While Cacciato may be regarded as a smiling idiot, an innocent, Berlin is not much farther down the spectrum toward being grounded in his present reality. He claims he is innocent. He doesn’t want to hurt or kill anyone, not even “the enemy”, even if he could ever be sure of who the enemy actually is. And so he pretends his way through life. In his pre-Vietnam civilian life, he “almost” had a girlfriend. He pretended to know how to fish when he took trips to the lake with his father. He walks one step after another, his goal in life to make additional goals. His goal in Vietnam is to imagine his exit away from it, somehow making his way to freedom and back to his old life, free of consequences, emulating Cacciato.

The dream chapters always have “Paris” in the title. Once they face the decision to continue the pursuit beyond the mountain range, Berlin’s is the deciding vote in favor of continuing. They come across a young Vietnamese girl, Sarkin Aung Wan, and her two elderly aunts. Sarkin says they are refugees heading west. They join them on the road until they fall through a literal hole leading them to the bunker of a North Vietnamese soldier, sentenced to serve in an underground observation post, a maze of underground pathways, complete with equipment to survive and a periscope with which he can radio back what he observes above ground. When they ask the officer to give them directions for getting out of the tunnels, the excessively polite officer explains that they are his prisoners. As they outnumber him, they bind him, break his periscope and radio equipment and make their way out. Sarkin says, “the way out is the way in” and they “fall out” of the tunnels by treading through collapsed passages.

This is probably the most improbable of their adventures. While the rest of their journey is filled with sensory detail and has the air of realism, the fact that they manage to elude capture and escape once they are caught, traveling across borders without passports or official orders, aside from the issue of somehow coming up with the money to pay for food, lodging, and sight-seeing, all bely the aura of actuality, grounding all of these chapters with dream logic. Berlin provides justification for his flights of the imagination:
“A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.”

Berlin also revisits his time in Vietnam pre-Cacciato pursuit. He describes each of the soldiers in the outfit as well as their first lieutenant, Sidney Martin. Lieutenant Martin was a good soldier but he was unrelenting in his strict adherence to standard operating procedure, repeatedly endangering the lives of his men by ordering them to go into tunnels and clear them before destroying them by grenades. In many cases, the soldier is shot by an unseen occupant, hidden in the dark. The men grow mutinous and once refuse to go into a tunnel, asking Martin to go in himself. Whether Martin was also killed by Viet Cong or by one of his own soldiers behind him is never clear. In any case, they got a new lieutenant, the older, sickly Corson, who spends half of his time commanding them while suffering from dysentery. He claims that this isn’t his war, being a veteran of the more clearly defined Korean War.

There are passages that anticipate much of the lyrical flow of ‘The Things They Carried’, where Tim O’Brien provides the “God’s eye” view of the narrator:
“In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a war is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers.”

Just as in ‘The Things They Carried’, O’Brien provides plenty of visceral detail—the ants, the humidity, the sensation of never being dry, the slime of the rice paddies that permeates the entire body and can never be washed off thoroughly —as well as the subjective experience of being in that war in that location in that point in history.

Initially, I was a bit disconcerted by the extensive fantasy passages that dominate the entire novel. This was not exactly magical realism except for the time in which Berlin thinks he sees Cacciato fly off the top of a mountain and the rabbit-hole into the bunker of the Viet Cong. It was as if three-fourths of ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ was taken up by Jesus’ “last temptation”, with only one fourth devoted to the alternative narrative that Kazantzakis invented for him. It also bears similarities to ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, in which the most direct way Kurt Vonnegut could address his experiences as a prisoner of war escaping the fire-bombing of Dresden was through the device of the time-slipping Billy Pilgrim, who also manages to communicate with an alien race of Tralfamadorians. ‘Cacciato’ never really leaves reality in such a fantastical way, although it maintains that an invented narrative in which the soldier can escape the hell in which he is trapped is the only therapeutic way the soldier can stay sane.

Berlin’s extended fantasy also anticipates O’Brien’s equally fictional fantasy in ‘The Things They Carried’, in which he flees upon receiving his draft notice, intending to go to Canada, meeting an old man with a cabin on a lake who senses O’Brien’s frustration and intention and gives him an opportunity to realize his goal, only for O’Brien to talk himself into accepting his fate. How many soldiers, including Tim O’Brien, indulged in similar escape fantasies? In the jungles of Vietnam, at one time or another, every soldier was a fiction writer.