Going After Cacciato

Speak to a veteran and they’ll verify a maxim of war: You might make it home, but the battle never ends. Tim O’Brien has been fighting the Vietnam War since completing his service in 1970. He traded the rat tat tat of gunfire for the clickity clack of the typewriter, chasing the ghosts of memory across the page. 

O’Brien first wrote of the war in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. In Going After Cacciato, he flips from fact to fiction. O’Brien wrote the memoir to remember and the novel to reimagine. The novel is a tale of escape. A fantasy, really. Exactly what every soldier dreams about.

Let’s get this out of the way O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried is much better than Going After Cacciato. It’s one of the best short story collections of all time. The stories are raw and real and rereadable. Few collections hit so hard. 

Released 11 years earlier, Going After Cacciato stands out for many of the same reasons. The absence of flare sets O’Brien apart. He uses simple words and short sentences. In isolation, any line feels basic. Knit together, the simple elements engender sophisticated storytelling. O’Brien’s mastery likely has roots in the war, where quick, clear communication can make the difference between life and death. That restraint gives him room to attempt something stranger than realism.

Told from the perspective of American soldier Paul Berlin, the novel follows his squad as they search for Cacciato—a squadmate who has gone AWOL. Where? To Paris, of course! Cacciato abandoned the squad to walk to Paris. 

It’s unclear whether anything in the story actually happens. Did Cacciato really exist? Did he abandon the squad? And did they pursue him? Or did Paul Berlin imagine it all from the observation post? 

When Paul Berlin watches two people debate in Delhi, for instance, this throwaway passage keeps both possibilities alive: Briefly Paul Berlin slipped back to his observation tower along the South China Sea. Partly here, partly there. Hard to tell which was real. 

While both possibilities hold weight, the further I get from the novel, the more I think Paul Berlin imagined it all. The way Paul Berlin describes Cacciato, for instance, makes him sound like someone imagined without the mind of a creator: There was something curiously unfinished about Cacciato. Open-faced and naive and plump, Cacciato lacked the fine detail, the refinements and final touches that maturity ordinarily marks on a boy of seventeen years old. The result was blurred and uncolored and bland. You could look at him then look away and not remember what you’d seen. 

And then there are all of the close encounters. Paul Berlin nearly catches Cacciato in the jungle. Paul Berlin spots Cacciato amongst a group of monks in Mandalay. Paul Berlin finds Cacciato’s address in Paris. The result is always the same: he’s never there. 

While Cacciato may not be memorable, several parts of the story are unforgettable. Three stand out for me. The first is a debate between Doc and Captain Fahyi Rhallon about whether soldiers operate with purpose. Doc says they don’t. The Captain disagrees. They debate in an underground dancehall as people swing and sway around them.

In another standout passage, O’Brien sends a clear message: We sent a bunch of kids to war without a sense of purpose. The passage includes a brief comparison to World War II, where the objectives were clear in a way that was never true for those fighting in the Vietnam war. 

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence the larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.

My favorite scene plays out at The Majestic Hotel near the end of the book. Written like a stage play, Paul Berlin and his Vietnamese love interest, Sarkin Aung Wan, each state their case. She appeals to love, he appeals to duty. 

Sarkin Aung Wan’s statement includes the following passage: It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act on behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objects that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit. 

Spec Four Paul Berlin: I am asking for a break from violence. But I am also asking for a positive commitment. You yearn for normality—an average house in an average town, a garden, perhaps a wife, the chance to grow old. Realize these things. Give up this fruitless pursuit of Cacciato. Forget him. Live now the dream you have dreamed. See Paris and enjoy it. Be happy. It is possible. It is within reach of a single decision. 

Yet it’s a decision that Paul Berlin cannot make. In his words:

Perhaps now you can see why I stress the importance of viewing obligations as a relationship between people, not between one person and some impersonal idea or principle. An idea, when violated, cannot make reprisals. A principle cannot refuse to shake my hand. Only people can do that. And it is this social power, the threat of social consequences, that stops me from making a full and complete break. Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one’s own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect. The real issue is how to find felicity within limits. Within the context of our obligations to other people. We all want peace. We all want dignity and domestic tranquility. But we want these to be honorable and lasting. We want a peace that endures. We want a peace we can be proud of. Even in imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligations cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits. 

Paul Berlin’s purpose is his obligation. And his obligation is to the soldiers in his squad. While they cannot find purpose in the war, they have found it in the obligations they have to one another.