If I Die in a Combat Zone

Like both his other works and those of his contemporaries, Tim O'Brien's nonfiction memoir is chronologically discontinuous, throwing the story into disarray. Speaking not as another character, but as himself, a grunt doing long humps in the boonies, O'Brien forges a perplexing identity for himself. Morally ambiguous, possibly disingenuous as a narrator, the story is a chilling illustration of the debilitating (physically and psychologically) effects of the war on the people who fought there, moreso than perhaps any work of fiction can do.

"It's incredible, it really is, isn't it? Ever think you'd be humping along some crazy-ass trail like this, jumping up and down like a goddamn bullfrog, dodging bullets all day? Back in Cleveland, man, I'd still be asleep." Barney smiled. "You ever see anything like this? Ever?"

"Yesterday," I said.

"Yesterday? Shit, yesterday wasn't nothing like this."

"Snipers yesterday, snipers today. What's the difference?"

"Guess so." Barney shrugged. "Holes in your ass either way, right? But, I swear, yesterday wasn't nothing like this."

"Snipers yesterday, snipers today," I said again. Barney laughed. "I tell you one thing," he said. "You think this is bad, just wait till tonight. My God, tonight'll be lovely. I'm digging me a foxhole like a basement."

Throughout the memoir, O'Brien grapples with the idea of desertion, much like the contemplating escaping to Canada in "On the Rainy River" (from The Things They Carried). Again, the author broaches moral issues in an effort to make sense of an apparently senseless war. In the end, just as in the its pre-war chronicle, O'Brien can't force himself to desert, but for selfish reasons, not moral ones.

It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite - inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.

[...]

The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't.... I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them, too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run.