ABSTRACT
The Vietcong major in Tim O’Brien’s second novel relates this advice to a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam. He is indirectly encouraging them to engage in Fussell’s third stage of a soldier’s journey through his war experiences, a period of quiet consideration away from the battlefield. The major’s advice also establishes a critical framework for this chapter, viewing a recurring theme in war literature from many angles and in the process arriving at new insights. Obviously, such critical consideration has occurred in the previous chapters as we examined soldiers’ loss of innocence and lessons learned on the battlefield. But in this chapter the specific theme is a soldier’s contemplation of fear, courage, and cowardice on the battlefield. Specifically, soldier-author Tim O’Brien in two of his Vietnam works, the autobiographical If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973) and his fictional Going After Cacciato (1978), considers two central questions: whether to flee the battlefield or fight, and once on the battlefield how to control one’s fear. Not surprisingly, these two themes, along with O’Brien’s self-reflective commentary on the nature of creating war stories, also emerge as central issues in his most recent Vietnam narrative, The Things They Carried (1990).1
