Going After Cacciato

Cacciato, a slow, cheerful soldier in Paul Berlin's squad, lays down his rifle one morning and announces he is walking out of the Vietnam War, all the way to Paris. The squad sets off after him. From an observation tower on the South China Sea, Paul Berlin spends a long night imagining how that pursuit might unfold, carrying the men across Laos, Burma, India, and Iran toward France, through capture and escape and a fall down an endless hole. Woven through the fantasy are Berlin's real memories of the war, the deaths of men in his platoon, and the fear he cannot name. O'Brien never lets the reader settle into what is real, using the imagined journey to hold everything the actual war has made unbearable.