This book is not for everyone. If you have trouble suspending disbelief or issues with magical realism, walk away now or read O'Brien's The Things They Carried. However, if you can just sit back and enjoy the ride as a master storyteller blurs the lines between reality and fantasy in such a way that there are no hard and fast truths (which is the point), then you will most likely enjoy the novel. Going After Cacciato is less accessible than The Things They Carried because trying to figure out the truth of what happens when Cacciato, a young soldier in Vietnam, chooses to go AWOL and walk all the way to Paris can drive you crazy. A unit is dispatched to hunt Cacciato down, but encounters a number of bizarre twists and turns along the way (think Catch-22 meets Alice in Wonderland).

The narrative is split into three distinct time periods and told from the point of view of Paul Berlin. They foucs on Berlin's first few months in the war, the hunt for Cacciato, and one night after the hunt for Cacciato is over (this occurs while Berlin is on night watch and thinking back to the hunt for Cacciato). The problem with making sense of the narrative comes from Paul Berlin himself--a young soldier ill-equipped to deal with the violence and atrocity of war, he uses his imagination to while away the tedious hours, as well as to recreate traumatic events with which he's not ready to cope. The point, however, is not what actually happened to Cacciato (in fact, upon a second reading, I found myself questioning the conclusion I came to after reading it for the first time), but how Berlin wisely or unwisely chooses to cope with events that are beyond his ability to control. ( )

In this story of the Viet Nam war, a platoon of soldiers is given an assignment by their lieutenant to go after and capture Cacciato, one of their own who has gone AWOL. The chapters of the book alternate between seeing the soldiers learning about warfare and watching them leave the battlefield to “go after Cacciato”. How can the platoon justify walking away from such an ugly war? Somewhere in this book, though, the reader discovers a fine line between fact and fiction and must draw his own conclusion.

O’Brien’s mastery of dialogue and setting create very lifelike scenes. My favorite chapter is one in which new soldiers are being observed by their leader as they ascend a mountain to reach their battlefield. This entire chapter is a metaphor for going to war. It is beautifully written and can stand alone as a remarkable essay.

The main story is told through the eyes of one soldier, Paul Berlin, who wonders what he is doing in the war at all. He is young and terrified, but he tries hard to pretend that all is okay by thinking of people and places familiar to him. When assigned to go after Cacciato, he considers if going AWOL would be an option for himself as well. The farther Berlin and his fellow soldiers distance themselves from the war, the more the reader must rationalize what the platoon is doing and what the author is trying to tell us.

This time in history is important to remember. I prefer to reflect on it in the way that this author presents it. The reader not only finds out the gruesome facts of war, but also experiences the emotions that go along with it. This is a terrific book which I highly recommend. It struck a deep emotional chord in me and perhaps will do the same to you. ( )

Ugh. I had to force myself to finish this one. I was super disappointed because I had enjoyed The Things They Carried quite a bit when I read it last summer. I had expected this book to be equally good, but it wasn't. The story felt choppy and disjointed, and I didn't care for any of the characters. ( )

I am in love with The Things They Carried, but I can't say that I "got" Going After Cacciato. While The Things They Carried was thought provoking, Going After Cacciato was puzzling. It was a great premise and I enjoyed Cacciato's quirky character the few times we actually encountered him, but the premise was quickly bogged down by the narrative - an element that did not plague the disjointed metafiction of The Things They Carried. ( )

In Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato the theater of war becomes the theater of the absurd as a private deserts his post in Vietnam, intent on walking 8,000 miles to Paris for the peace talks. The remaining members of his squad are sent after him, but what happens then is anybody's guess: "The facts were simple: They went after Cacciato, they chased him into the mountains, they tried hard. They cornered him on a small grassy hill. They surrounded the hill. They waited through the night. And at dawn they shot the sky full of flares and then they moved in.... That was the end of it. The last known fact. What remained were possibilities."
It is these possibilities that make O'Brien's National Book Award-winning novel so extraordinary. Told from the perspective of squad member Paul Berlin, the search for Cacciato soon enters the realm of the surreal as the men find themselves following an elusive trail of chocolate M&M's through the jungles of Indochina, across India, Iran, Greece, and Yugoslavia to the streets of Paris. The details of this hallucinatory journey alternate with feverish memories of the war--men maimed by landmines, killed in tunnels, engaged in casual acts of brutality that would be unthinkable anywhere else. Reminiscent of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Going After Cacciato dishes up a brilliant mix of ferocious comedy and bleak horror that serves to illuminate both the complex psychology of men in battle and the overarching insanity of war. --Alix Wilbe