The Books: “Going After Cacciato” (Tim O’Brien)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Going After Cacciato, by Tim O’Brien.

Jean was the one who turned me on to Tim O’Brien – or, should I say, she demanded in no uncertain terms that I read Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. She basically screamed in my face, “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS!” My dad loves those books, too. Actually, come to think of it, Going After Cacciato is akin to Catch-22 in the collective O’Malley Book Shelf: Everyone – cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings – everyone has read Catch-22 and everyone loves it. God forbid an O’Malley would read Catch-22 and say, “I found the book kind of … meh.” We would not know how to handle such a person. We would wonder if they were adopted. Reading Catch-22 is an O’Malley rite of passage – and even if you don’t FEEL like reading it, you had best read it – so that you at least can pick up on the jokes at Thanksgiving, or the references thrown around to Major Major Major Major. You’ll be in the dark if you don’t read it! Anyway, Going After Cacciato isn’t quite as important to the O’Malleys as a whole, but it is close.

Ironically, I think Jean came to Tim O’Brien outside the family circle – I think she had to read it for a class in college – and she went apeshit for him. Just nuts. So naturally I had to pick up the books as well. I’m starting with Going After Cacciato because, in its own way, The Things They Carried knocked me even more on my ass and I feel like I need to sneak up on it.

Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979 and is now considered a classic of Vietnam War literature. Private Cacciato, who appears in the book almost as a shadow, a nonentity, puts down his rifle and walks away. But he doesn’t return. He vanishes into the jungle. Into … where did he go? The book blends fantasy and reality, daydreaming and nightmares … sometimes we aren’t sure if we are actually seeing what Cacciato is doing (he’s going to walk to Paris, going west, from Vietnam … okay, so that’s a long way …) or if we are seeing what his buddies in the platoon are imagining him doing. Cacciato takes on almost mythical proportions. His journey becomes something they all invest in, they live it vicariously – even though … it’s not like Cacciato sends postcards, saying, “Hey guys – made it to Tibet! Wish you were here!” No. Cacciato vanishes. And so he becomes the symbol on which everyone can project their longings, their hopes, fears … He is more important not there than he was when he was there. Paul Berlin, the lead character (oh my god, i love him so much) “goes after Cacciato” … but as you read the book, it becomes hallucinatory at points. I think it’s wonderful writing … Most of the men are sleep-deprived, they’ve smoked a bunch of weed, they’re disoriented, and exhausted. Sometimes things get un-real, or hyper-real, when you are in that state. The book reads like that, at times. Almost overly clear … and you wonder: Is this a dream? Or is this really happening? Are they really spending Christmas in Tehran, as they “go after Cacciato”? Or …

Tim O’Brien is a wonderful writer. He rips your heart out. He doesn’t overdo anything – and don’t even get me started on The Things They Carried … he dives into the details, the sensory details of the experience – the mud, the rain, the whites of eyeballs, the cigarette smoke, whatever … His writing to me sounds like a voice. At least in Going After Cacciato. Wait – let me edit that thought. Here is how the book opens. It’s a “voice”. You can totally hear it:

It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead. The rain fed fungus that grew in the men’s boots and socks, and their socks rotted, and their feet turned white and soft so that the skin could be scraped off with a fingernail, and Stink Harris woke up screaming one night with a leech on his tongue. When it was not raining, a low mist moved across the paddies, blending the elements into a single gray element, and the war was cold and pasty and rotten. Lieutenant Corson, who came to replace Lieutenant Sidney Martin, contracted the dysentery. The tripflares were useless. The ammunition corroded and the foxholes filled with mud and water during the nights, and in the mornings there was always the next village, and the war was always the same. The monsoons were part of the war. In early September Vaught caught an infection. He’d been showing Oscar Johnson the sharp edge on his bayonet, drawing it swiftly across his forearm to peel off a layer of mushy skin. “Like a Gillette Blue Blade,” Vaught had said proudly. There was no blood, but in two days the bacteria soaked in and the arm turned yellow, so they bundled him up and called in a dustoff, and Vaught left the war. He never came back. Later they had a letter from him that described Japan as smoky and full of slopes, but in the enclosed snapshot Vaught looked happy enough, posing with two sightly nurses, a wine bottle rising from between his thighs. It was a shock to learn he’d lost the arm. Soon afterward Ben Nystrom shot himself through the foot, but he did not die, and he wrote no letters. These were all things to joke about. The rain, too. And the cold. Oscar Johnson said it made him think of Detroit in the month of May. “Lootin’ weather,” he liked to say. “The dark an’ gloom, just right for rape an’ lootin’.” Then someone would say that Oscar had a swell imagination for a darkie.

That was one of the jokes. There was a joke about Oscar. There were many jokes about Billy Boy Watkins, the way he’d collapsed of fright on the field of battle. Another joke was about the lieutenant’s dysentery, and another was about Paul Berlin’s purple biles. There were jokes about the postcard pictures of Christ that Jim Pederson used to carry, and Stink’s ringworm, and the way Buff’s helmet filled with life after death. Some of the jokes were about Cacciato. Dumb as a bullet, Stink said. Dumb as a month-old oyster fart, said Harold Murphy.

In October, near the end of the month, Cacciato left the war.

So that’s the voice. It’s weary, it’s specific, it’s over it … and then, there are moments of high philosophy, a sweeping sense of spiritual truth, of Man being with Himself … an acute awareness of what it is to be alive.

The excerpt I chose today has Paul Berlin going through a night-watch. He’s tired, so tired that he’s not sure what he’s seeing is real. And time appears to have literally stood still. Cacciato has already left, which changes everything in the platoon. Everyone gets disoriented. Especially because there is never a word from him again. Where did he go? Everyone’s mind becomes unhinged, as they follow Cacciato.

It’s a great American book.

EXCERPT FROM Going After Cacciato, by Tim O’Brien.

Spec Four Paul Berlin tilted his wristwatch to catch moonlight. Twelve-twenty now – the incredible slowness with which time passed. Incredible, too, the tricks his fear did with time.

He wound the watch as tight as it would go. Facing east, out to sea, he counted to sixty very slowly, breathing with each count, and when he was done he looked at the watch again. Still twelve-twenty. He held it to his ear. The ticking was loud, brittle-sounding. The second hand made its infinite sweep.

Maybe it was the time of night that created the distortions. Middle-hour guard, it was a bad time. First-hour guard was better; the safest time, and surest, and once it ended you could sleep the night through. Or last-hour guard. Last guard was all right, too, because there was the expectation of dawn coming upon the sea, and you could watch the water turn to color as if paint had been poured into it at the horizon, and the pretty colors helped sustain pretty thoughts.

Sure, it was the hour. Things shimmered silver in the moonlight, the sea and the coils of wire below the tower, the sand winding along the beach. The night was moving now. He tried not to look at it, but it was true – the night moved in waves, fluttering. The grasses inland moved, and the far trees. Middle-hour guard, it was a bad time for keeping watch.

Kneeling, he lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hand to hide the glow, then he stood and leaned against the sandbagged wall and looked down on the sea. The sea helped. It protected the back and gave a sense of distance from the war, a warm washing feeling, and a feeling of connection to distant lands. His mind worked that way. Sometimes, during the hot afternoons beneath the tower, he would look out to sea and imagine using it as a means of escape – stocking Oscar’s raft with plenty of rations and foul-weather gear and drinking water, then shoving out through the first heavy breakers, then hoisting up a poncho as a sail, then lying back and letting the winds and currents carry him away – to Samoa, maybe, or to some hidden isle in the South Pacific, or to Hawaii, or maybe all the way home. Pretending. It wasn’t dreaming, it wasn’t craziness. Just a way of passing time, which seemed never to pass.

He could make out the dim outlines of Oscar’s raft bobbing at anchor in the moonlight. They used it mostly for swimming. Sometimes, when boredom got the best of them, they would take it out to deeper water and fish off it, spend the whole day out there, separating themselves from the daily routine.

He watched the sea and the bobbing raft for a long time. Then he checked the watch again. Twelve twenty-two.

He tried to remember tricks for making time move.

Counting, that was one trick. Count the remaining days. Break the days into hours, and count the hours, then break the hours into minutes and count them one by one, and the minutes into seconds.

He began to figure it. Arrived June 3. And now it was … What was it? November 20, or 25. Somewhere in there. It was hard to fix exactly. But it was November, he was sure of that. Late November. Not like the old-time Novembers along the Des Moines River, no lingering foliage. No sense of change or transition. Here there was no autumn. No leaves to turn with the turning of seasons, no seasons, no crispness in the air, no Thanksgiving and no football, nothing to guage passing by. Inland, in the dark beyond the beach, there were a few scrawny trees, but these were mostly pines, and the pines did not change whatever the season.

November-the-what?

Oscar’s birthday had been in July. In August, Billy Boy Watkins had died of fright – no, June. That was in June. June, the first day at the war. Then, in July, they’d celebrated Oscar’s birthday with plenty of gunfire and flares, and they’d marched through the sullen villages along the Song Tra Bong, the awful quiet everywhere, and then, in August, Rudy Chassler had finally broken the quiet. That had been August. Then – then September. Keeping track wasn’t easy. The order of things – chronologies – that was the hard part. Long stretches of silence, dullness, long nights and endless days on the march, and sometimes the truly bad times: Pederson, Buff, Frenchie Tucker, Bernie Lynn. But what was the order? How did the pieces fit, and into which months? And what was it now – November-the-what?

He extinguished the cigarette against his thumbnail and flipped it down to the beach.

Stepping over the sleeping men, he moved to the tower’s west wall and faced inland.

He tried to concentrate on the future. What to do when the war was over. That was one happy thought. Yes – when the war ended he would … he would go home to Fort Dodge. He would. He would go home on a train, slowly, looking out at the country as it passed, recognizing things, seeing how the country flattened and turned to corn, the silos painted white, and he would pay attention to the details. At the depot, when the train stopped, he would brush off his uniform and be certain all the medals were in place, and he would step off boldly, boldly, and he would shake his father’s hand and look him in the eye. “I did okay,” he would say. “I won some medals.” And his father would nod. And later, the next day perhaps, they would go out to where his father was building houses in the development west of town, and they’d walk through the unfinished rooms and his father would explain what would be where, how the wiring was arranged, the difficulties with subcontractors and plumbers, but how the houses would be strong and lasting, how to took good materials and good craftsmanship and care to build houses that would be strong and lasting.

The night was moving. He concentrated hard, squinting, trying to stop the fluttering …

He would go to Europe. That’s what he would do. Spend some time in Fort Dodge, then take off for a tour of Europe. He would learn French. Learn French, then take off for Paris, and when he got there he would drink red wine in Cacciato’s honor. Visit all the museums and monuments, learn the history, sit in the cafes along the river and smile at the pretty girls. Take a flat in Montmartre. Rise early and walk to the open market for breakfast. He would eat very slowly, crossing his legs and maybe reading a paper, letting things pass by, then maybe he’d walk about the city and learn the names of places, not as a tourist but as a man who comes to learn and understand. He would study details. He would look for the things Cacciato would have looked for. It could be done. That was the crazy thing about it – for all the difficulties, for all the hard times and stupidity and errors, for all that, it could truly be done.