English Paper

O'Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone. New York: Broadway Books, 1975.

Tim O'Brien is confused about the Vietnam War. He is getting drafted into it, but is also protesting it. He gets to boot camp and finds it very difficult to know that he is going off to a country far away from home and fighting a war that he didn't believe was morally right. Before O'Brien gets to Vietnam he visits a military Chaplin about his problem with the war. "O'Brien I am really surprised to hear this. You're a good kid but you are betraying you country when you say these things"(60). This says a lot about O'Brien's views on the Vietnam War. In the reading of the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien explains his struggles in boot camp and when he is a foot soldier in Vietnam.

I've always been a fan of war books, and when it came to this project, I decided to stick with the books that interest me the most. When I heard that O'Brien wrote bestselling books from his experiences in Vietnam I deicide to do my project on him as the author. To be honest I wasn't even planning on reading If I Die in a Combat Zone at first, but as I read the first page, I see the detail and clarity of his writing, and I know it will be a great book. "Count them--that's ten times to day! Ever been shot at ten times in one day?"(2). When ever I read a line like this I am amazed, its just hard to grasp the fact that in one day his company got shot at ten plus times. Not to mention the mines they had to watch out for, and all of the VC booby-traps. I am doing my project on Tim O'Brien. So this book is a perfect fit because it is one of his great books about Vietnam. Not only is it a great fit for my project, it is also a very good book. I had no troubles

reading it because it flowed so well together. I have found that it is really easy to read a book for a project when you actually like the book!

When I first started reading the book I was very excited because the first few pages were very detailed and made me want to read the rest of the book as soon as possible. The only thing I really didn't like was when he flashed back to his time back in his hometown in Minnesota. "Late at night, the town deserted, two or three of us would drive a car around and around the town's lake, talking about the war" (16). I can see why he puts this in the book because it has a lot of relevance to his life in that time. He was a protestor of the war and didn't think that it was right. What O'Brien signifies by flashing back to this time before he was drafted it shows the major conflict in the book, being drafted into a war that he wanted no part in. Other than that I really never lost focus in the book, partly because as his time in Vietnam progressed the action grew and his experiences were growing more and more exciting. "Then the RPG fire resumed. Our own return fire stopped as everyone ducked