'Soldiers are dreamers'

And not to bore with you passages from other books, but I also found this passage at the beginning of O'Brien's war memoir very moving.

Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn't and most didn't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

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.

The first paragraph as a summary of the war experience is just amazing ("most didn't care"). But the question in the second, "Do dreams offer lessons?", seems to foreshadow the format of "Cacciato," how it's one big daydream in a way. So, do you have any thoughts on how Paul Berlin's dream offers a lesson?

Courage

I really loved this passage from "If I die in a Combat Zone." It's about how true courage can't exist without other qualities. I think it informs some of the scenes in "Cacciato," scenes where apparent cowardice might more properly be interpreted as courage.

For courage, according to Plato, is one of the four parts of virtue. It is there with temperance, justice and wisdom, and all parts are necessary to make a sublime human being. In fact, Plato says, men without courage are men without temperance, justice or wisdom, just as without wisdom men are not truly courageous. Men must know what they do is courageous, they must know it is right, and that kind of knowledge is wisdom and nothing else. Which is why I know few brave men. Either they are stupid and do not know what is right. Or they know what is right and cannot bring themselves to do it. Or they know what is right and do it, but do not feel and understand the fear that must be overcome.

The girl

Any thoughts on Sarkin Aung Wan and her determination to play house in Paris with Paul Berlin?

Best and worst

What was your favorite aspect of the book? And least favorite?

My favorite: I loved the notion of traveling overland from Vietnam to Paris and the descriptions of the places they saw: Mandalay, India, Tehran, Greece, etc. And I admired the depiction of the war-without-a-front as a psychological battle that occurred in each man's head. I also found the events leading up to Lt. Martin's murder eerie and awe-inspiring.

My least favorite: Maybe this is a comment on my own comprehension rather than the author's skill, but I found many of the characters hard to picture and hard to distinguish one from the other. Even Paul Berlin. I didn't feel I had a great grasp on who he actually was. (I did like the portraits of the two lieutenants: the strict, by the book Lt. Martin and the more realistic, more humane Lt. Corson, who fell in love in India and wanted to stay).

Vietnam

One of the things I really like about Tim O'Brien's books about Vietnam is how they give you a visceral sense of being there — feeling what the physical landscape is like, the terrible heat, the dampness, the insects, the rice paddies, the mountains and villages and land-mined trails; and the psychological landscape, the constant fear and exhaustion and homesickness.

Do you think he did a good job with this? (I actually have a stronger sense of these things in his other books, but I'm curious what you think having just read "Cacciato").

What did you think?

I found this book challenging at first because the characters seemed kind of a blur to me and trying to sort out what was real and what was imagined was rather tiring. But I enjoyed the book more as it went on, maybe because at some point I was able to conclude that it's ALL fiction or, conversely, that it's ALL truth, and I was more comfortable just being carried along by the narrative.