HAYWIRE ISSUE 9 SPRING 2017

Losing, Winning, and Something Inbetween
by Olivia Swarthout, 12d
HAYWIRE Issue 9 Spring 2017
Tim O’Brien’s novel
Going After Cacciato follows a
group of soldiers through their
personal conflicts in the Vietnam
War, very few of which relate
directly to the motivations
of the war itself. The men are
not occupied with the politics
of why they are fighting through
vast tracts of foreign, hostile
land. In fact, what one might call
the “bigger picture” has little to
do with how each man rationalizes
his predicament to himself
- smaller, more personal goals
play a much more central role in
how they approach their struggles.
This is not, however, to say
that the personal ambitions of
the soldiers are any more tangible
or objective than those of the
Vietnam War at large. The men
featured in Going After Cacciato
must face their own internal
dilemmas of identity and ideology,
all the while dealing with
the perils and threats of fighting
Photos by Eric
Groefke, 12a
their way through miles of dense
jungle, death all around and
within their squad. Though Spec
Four Paul Berlin claims himself
unable to coalesce his thoughts
and wishes into tangible goals
outside of “staying alive long
enough to find goals worth living
for,” over the course of the
story O’Brien lays bare a deep
set of conflicting desires within
Paul Berlin; he wants to remain
detached from the war yet has
no way around the atrocities he
must commit, and his yearning
for a stable, conventional life
contravenes his compulsion
to carry through with his duty.
When a fellow soldier, Cacciato,
deserts the squad, Paul Berlin
must confront the mutually
exclusive nature of many of his
desires. Upon ultimately choosing
duty over desertion when
he kills Cacciato, Paul Berlin
embarks on an elaborate daydream
of instead chasing Cac-
ciato through all of Asia and Europe,
westward toward Paris, the
unimaginably distant city of lights.
Though having fulfilled his role as a
soldier doesn’t entirely instill Paul
Berlin with the sense of triumph he
seeks from the War, in creating a
surrogate reality for his unfulfilled
dreams, Paul Berlin is able to, briefly,
seize the unattainable triumph
incongruous with the practical decisions
he feels must make, granting
himself the victory he wishes
for so badly, alongside the victory
of staying alive through the war.
Paul Berlin is fundamentally
different from the soldiers he
fights alongside - over and over he
tells himself that he is detached
from his comrades and the fighting,
through the steamy jungles
and sun-baked fields. Perhaps it is
the only way for “Paul Berlin, who
had no desire to confront death until
he was old and feeble” (167) to
keep hold of his life and sanity in
the war, as from the beginning we
see that he is engaged not only in
a physical but also a deep mental
struggle for his identity, as he is
disgusted by the senseless violence
of the war but cannot bring himself
to speak up or break free. As
a form of escapism, he repeatedly
envisions himself explaining to his
friends and family back home how
he was able to remain detached
from the atrocities, imagining himself
separate from the soldiers who
have surrendered themselves to the
pushes and pulls of the the tides
of war. In Paul Berlin’s mind, “He
would adjust. He would play the
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