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If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home Kindle Edition

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"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."
—Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.
Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateAugust 24, 2011
- File size3260 KB
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Going After Cacciato | Northern Lights | America Fantastica | July, July | In The Lake of the Woods | The Things They Carried | |
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Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
Amazon.com Review
"When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville--GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai ... you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine."
O'Brien paints an unvarnished portrait of the infantry soldier's life that is at once mundane and terrifying--the endless days of patrolling punctuated by firefights that end as suddenly and inconclusively as they begin; the mind-numbing brutality of burned villages and trampled rice patties; the terror of tunnels, minefields, and the ever-present threat of death. Powerful as these scenes are, perhaps the most memorable chapter in the book concerns his decision to desert just a few weeks before he was sent to Vietnam. "The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't.... I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them, too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run." Tim O'Brien went into the war opposing it and came out knowing exactly why. If I Die in a Combat Zone is more than just a memoir of a disastrous war; it is also a meditation on heroism and cowardice, on the mutability of truth and morality in a war zone and, most of all, on the simple, human capacity to endure the unendurable. --Alix Wilber
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From the Inside Flap
Review
—The New York Times Book Review
"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."
—Minneapolis Star and Tribune --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"It's incredible, it really is, isn't it? Ever think you'd be humping along some crazy-ass trail like this, jumping up and down like a goddamn bullfrog, dodging bullets all day? Back in Cleveland, man, I'd still be asleep." Barney smiled. "You ever see anything like this? Ever?"
"Yesterday," I said.
"Yesterday? Shit, yesterday wasn't nothing like this."
"Snipers yesterday, snipers today. What's the difference?"
"Guess so." Barney shrugged. "Holes in your ass either way, right? But, I swear, yesterday wasn't nothing like this."
"Snipers yesterday, snipers today," I said again.
Barney laughed. "I tell you one thing," he said. "You think this is bad, just wait till tonight. My God, tonight'll be lovely. I'm digging me a foxhole like a basement."
We lay next to each other until the volley of fire stopped. We didn't bother to raise our rifles. We didn't know which way to shoot, and it was all over anyway.
Barney picked up his helmet and took out a pencil and put a mark on it. "See," he said, grinning and showing me ten marks, "that's ten times today. Count them-one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! Ever been shot at ten times in one day?"
"Yesterday," I said. "And the day before that, and the day before that."
"No way. It's been lots worse today."
"Did you count yesterday?"
"No. Didn't think of it until today. That proves today's worse."
"Well, you should've counted yesterday."
We lay quietly for a time, waiting for the shooting to end, then Barney peeked up. "Off your ass, pal. Company's moving out." He put his pencil away and jumped up like a little kid on a pogo stick. Barney had heart.
I followed him up the trail, taking care to stay a few meters behind him. Barney was not one to worry about land mines. Or snipers. Or dying. He just didn't worry.
"You know," I said, "you really amaze me, kid. No kidding. This crap doesn't get you down, does it?"
"Can't let it," Barney said. "Know what I mean? That's how a man gets himself lethalized."
"Yeah, but--"
"You just can't let it get you down."
It was a hard march and soon enough we stopped the chatter. The day was hot. The days were always hot, even the cool days, and we concentrated on the heat and the fatigue and the simple motions of the march. It went that way for hours. One leg, the next leg. Legs counted the days.
"What time is it?"
"Don't know." Barney didn't look back at me. "Four o'clock maybe."
"Good."
"Tuckered? I'll hump some of that stuff for you, just give the word."
"No, it's okay. We should stop soon. I'll help you dig that basement."
"Cool."
"Basements, I like the sound. Cold, deep. Basements."
A shrill sound. A woman's shriek, a sizzle, a zipping-up sound. It was there, then it was gone, then it was there again.
"Jesus Christ almighty," Barney shouted. He was already flat on his belly. "You okay?"
"I guess. You?"
"No pain. They were aiming at us that time, I swear. You and me."
"Charlie knows who's after him," I said. "You and me."
Barney giggled. "Sure, we'd give 'em hell, wouldn't we? Strangle the little bastards."
We got up, brushed ourselves off, and continued along the line of march.
The trail linked a cluster of hamlets together, little villages to the north and west of the Batangan Peninsula. Dirty, tangled country. Empty villes. No people, no dogs or chickens. It was a fairly wide and flat trail, but it made dangerous slow curves and was flanked by deep hedges and brush. Two squads moved through the tangles on either side of us, protecting the flanks from close-in ambushes, and the company's progress was slow.
"Captain says we're gonna search one more ville today," Barney said. "Maybe--"
"What's he expect to find?"
Barney shrugged. He walked steadily and did not look back. "Well, what does he expect to find? Charlie?"
"Who knows?"
"Get off it, man. Charlie finds us. All day long he's been shooting us up. How's that going to change?"
"Search me," Barney said. "Maybe we'll surprise him."
"Who?"
"Charlie. Maybe we'll surprise him this time."
"You kidding me, Barney?"
The kid giggled. "Can't never tell. I'm tired, so maybe ol' Charles is tired too. That's when we spring our little surprise."
"Tired," I muttered. "Wear the yellow bastards down, right?"
But Barney wasn't listening.
Soon the company stopped moving. Captain Johansen walked up to the front of the column, conferred with a lieutenant, then moved back. He asked for the radio handset, and I listened while he called battalion headquarters and told them we'd found the village and were about to cordon and search it. Then the platoons separated into their own little columns and began circling the hamlet that lay hidden behind thick brush. This was the bad time: The wait.
"What's the name of this goddamn place?" Barney said. He threw down his helmet and sat on it. "Funny, isn't it? Somebody's gonna ask me someday where the hell I was over here, where the bad action was, and, shit, what will I say?"
"Tell them St. Vith."
"What?"
"St. Vith," I said. "That's the name of this ville. It's right here on the map. Want to look?"
He grinned. "What's the difference? You say St. Vith, I guess that's it. I'll never remember. How long's it gonna take me to forget your fuckin' name?" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
--The New York Times Book Review
"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."
--Minneapolis Star and Tribune --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
TIM O’BRIEN received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the Pulitzer finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, The Things They Carried; the acclaimed novels Tomcat in Love and Northern Lights; and the national bestselling memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone. His novel In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. In 2010 he received the Katherine Anne Porter Award for a distinguished lifetime body of work and in 2012 he received the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing in 2013.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B005FY5YSY
- Publisher : Crown; Reprint edition (August 24, 2011)
- Publication date : August 24, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 3260 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 242 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0767904435
- Best Sellers Rank: #226,057 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

TIM O'BRIEN received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the acclaimed novels The Things They Carried and July, July. In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. O'Brien lives in Austin, Texas.
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“If I Die in a Combat Zone...” is a vivid and tightly-written account of the daily minutia that made up the lives of American soldiers serving in Vietnam. O’Brien’s descriptions of his surroundings are richly detailed, while at the same time not wasting a single word or thought on any unrelated subject. You are with him in the rice paddies, and you feel his fear as he lies awake on ambush duty, waiting for the moment when then the relative peace and quiet of the night explodes into the chaotic nightmare of combat.
He deals with the ever present specter of death in a way that is both matter of fact and bewildering. He loses friends to enemy fire, to mines, to boobytraps, and more, and yet he continues on, putting one foot in front of the other with the resigned nature of a man being led to the gallows. His academic perspective on the war both insulates him from the worst atrocities (as he tries to frame them in the context of wars gone by) and exposes the raw nerves that lie just below the surface, waiting to be scoured and exposed to the harsh light of reality.
I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to gain a modicum of insight into the mind and experiences of the American soldier’s experience in Vietnam. It’s a very quick read, but if you allow yourself to linger in O’Brien’s descriptions they will transport you, even if only for the moment, to a time when America was sharply divided over the politics of a controversial war and young men fought for their lives in a foreign land, most only wishing to return home alive.
O'Brien "grew out of one war and into another." He is the son of a WWII soldier, "who fought the great campaign against the tyrants of the 1940s." His mother served in the WAVES. Drafted in the summer of 1968, "Nam-bound," O'Brien thought the war was "wrongly conceived and poorly justified," and seriously planned to escape to Canada, or to Sweden. However, his entire history of life on the American prairie, the values instilled in him by parents and teachers, pulled him in another direction. In the end, he submitted. "It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite - inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all." Thus, he articulates, so well, the reasons that many of my generation, far less eloquent than he, went silently off to fight a war they did not believe in - and too many never returned.
As a woman from the "Vietnam generation," this book was very painful to read. Yet, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I was still a girl, in so many ways, when Tim O'Brien landed in Vietnam. And he, and our peers, were still boys. I will always feel wonder at their courage - even if they did not feel particularly courageous. How did the regular guys I graduated school with, manage to shoot and be shot at? If there are any answers to my questions about what happened "over there" and why, this book gives me a pretty good idea. I travel into combat with the author, walk over minefields, feel the red earth of Vietnam, as he digs eternal holes to lie in at night. I also feel some of his horror, pain, disillusionment, and admire his dark humor.
O'Brien writes beautifully, with great sensitivity, of that terrible time. "Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."
Top reviews from other countries


There was not as much action in it as I normally like. The author often times wanders into speculations about common themes to war like the nature of courage, what makes war just etc., but this in itself is actually very well done and very interesting, so didn't detract from the book for me. It still very successfully portrays the mixture of tedium and terror that was the lot of the author as an infantryman in Vietnam though, constantly in terror of mines and booby traps, snipers and ambushes. It also has beautifully described imagery.
More importantly though, this book is a criticism of a war that the author saw as very wrong, but which his obligations to society led him to enter anyway, despite very thorough planning to dodge his draft by fleeing to Canada and then Sweden. For me this was the most interesting part of the book, as the author deliberately writes in a detached way. Like an outside commentator, wanting to hate everything about the US ARMY but most especially the government for sending him to fight a wrong war. Yet by the end we see he is just the same as all the other soldiers. Just as confused and conflicted.
From this perspective then, it is a book all politicians and anyone quick to judge their soldiers as murderers should read as the author discusses arguments about war and courage as old as time. It shows the pain and suffering all those involved went through, from the soldiers of both sides to the civilians caught in the middle. Suffering common as such to all wars. And ultimately it shows the often impossible position governments place their people in by sending them to war with little or no consideration for those men, so that as in Vietnam, their own people turned on the soldiers who were viewed as murderers of innocents. Yet this book clearly shows how hard discerning enemy from friend was in this guerrilla style war.
As such this book is, despite being short, an all encompassing memorial to all those caught up in this war, and as the reviews on the cover say, will stay with the reader. But then this is true for all books about this conflict I have read, with excellent other examples being:
'Once a Warrior King.'
'We Were Soldiers Once and Young.'
'Pathfinder.'
'To the Limit.'
'The Boys of '67.'


The battle sequences he tells us about are sometimes hair-raising, sometimes risible, but this is a very thoughtful book, too. He was lucky, he somehow made it out of there, got a job behind the lines and survived long enough to go home. Mai Lai is touched upon, mainly its effect on a career Major, who wanted to fight a cleaner fight, one like the Korean War, where matters seemed more straightforward. It drove the Major to madness, which only ended when he burned down a local whorehouse. The Major was sent home. Other men shot a finger off, or a toe, anything to get out of the hell of Vietnam. The book is eloquent about the experiences of the men who fought in that war, whose lives were put at risk for reasons that still seem, all these years later, to be wrong. Cruelties abound both in the way the soldiers treat the Vietnamese villagers and in the way war is waged. Hard to escape the conclusion that, waging war itself is wrong.

A brilliant read about one US Soldiers year long tour in Vietnam