If I Die in a Combat Zone: A Soldier's Reflection on War and Life

VaCultureJunkie: Having read “The Things They Carried” (5 stars!), this novel was top of my list as I began a deep dive into the history of the Vietnam War. Along with Ken Burns’ documentary on the subject I added O’Brien’s firsthand accounts of the war to the top of my reading list (also included: “Matterhorn”, “We Were Soldiers Once, And Young”, and a few others).

“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...

United States on Aug 27, 2019

David: Vietnam war novel of the finest quality. Well written, lots of detail, highly recommend this!

Canada on Sep 06, 2018

HK Legends: This is a very articulate and well written book about the Vietnam War. Almost literary in style, I would say, and quickly put me in mind of Charlie Sheen's Taylor character's commentary in the film 'Platoon.'. A real account of the personal battle the author had with his conscience over whether he should ever have allowed himself to be drawn into the Vietnam War.

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...

United Kingdom on Dec 31, 2017

punch: Slightly dated in its style, which makes the story all the more authentic, this novel gives an account of the mindset of the young soldier posted in a war which he doesn't fully understand. Harsh, yet strangely fascinating.

France on Sep 04, 2017

KSL: If you are looking for combat accounts, don#t buy this book. It is full of wanna-be-philosophy, and it lacks content about real experience. Try Guns-Up.

Germany on Jan 13, 2015

Eileen Shaw: Tim O'Brien knew he didn't want to go to war, but he went all the same. He is honest about his feelings, mainly, he says, the sheer embarrassment it would have caused his family if he acted on his true principles, which were to evade the call-up. He even made investigations about where he might go to avoid the draft, plumping for Sweden via Canada. But in the end he went to Vietnam. He debates his reasoning throughout this book as he learns that the truth about battle is that it kills; not him personally, but in many ways he loses the simplicity of faith in his country. His main area of controversy is about the nature of courage. That courage is not just one thing; that it is about the qualities one brings to an almost impossible position. Head down in a foxhole, all you want to do is go home. Your commanders are sometimes inadequate, your compatriots sometimes untrustworthy, nothing is guaranteed other than that you don't want to die. But there are several hundred Viet Cong out there who want to kill you.

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...

United Kingdom on Apr 25, 2013

Jana L.Perskie: Tim O'Brien is an extraordinarily talented writer. This painful and disturbing memoir of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam, is a vivid and heartfelt chronicle.
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...

United States on Aug 20, 2003