57 pages • 1 hour read
Tim O'BrienGoing After Cacciato
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: "How They Were Organized"
Paul Berlin arrives at Chu Lai’s Combat Center for training on June 3, 1968. The next morning, he is taken to a set of wooden bleachers that face the ocean with the other new recruits. A corporal sits in the sand, stares at the sea, and says nothing for an hour. He then looks at the men and says, “That completes your first lecture on how to survive this shit. I hope you paid attention” (37).
They use the nearby village to train for search-and-destroy missions, and Paul interrogates a small girl. The soldiers receive instruction in various survival methods, weaponry, and enemy tactics. They travel across a pretend minefield where an officer yells BOOMO at random. “Paul Berlin, feeling hurt at being told he was a dead man, complained that it was unfair” (38). Paul dislikes being called a “twerp” and other names—he admits that he’s afraid but hopes it will go away. He writes to his father, trying to sound brave, but asking him to look up Chu Lai up on a map because he feels lost.
Six days pass in this manner, with Paul staying apart from the other men and trying to absorb his new reality. On the seventh day, he’s assigned to a unit—with twelve times more support personnel than combat, “Paul Berlin counted it as bad luck, a statistically improbable outcome, to be assigned to the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade” (40). Paul reflects on his poor sense of direction and survival skills: recalling the time he got lost in the woods trying to track his father on an Indian Guides trip, and they went home early.
When he joins his unit, a soldier offers him a safe job painting fences—when Paul says he wants it, the solder tells him he’s come “to the wrong…fuckin…place” (41). Paul hides in the latrine, where it feels peaceful. He unites with his platoon on June 11; they don’t have fire teams or a platoon sergeant, and there’s only one oddly-trained medic. Lieutenant Sidney Martin is the well credentialed but unwise platoon leader; his replacement, Lieutenant Corson, has a less prestigious background but is better loved by the men.
The men “were organized around personalities, specialties of knowledge and tradition…superstition…luck…pride…trust” (43). They follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) both formal and informal. The men hate Lieutenant Sidney Martin because he insists on formal SOPs, including searching tunnels before blowing them up, which results in the deaths of Frenchie Tucker and Bernie Lynn.
After seven days, Private First Class Paul Berlin boards a helicopter that flies him over the war zone, all the “places he might die, a million possibilities” (44), and this is the true beginning to his time at war.
Chapter 5 Summary: "The Observation Post"
Paul stands on middle-hour guard, the worst time, at 12:20 AM. Time seems to stand still, but the night feels like it’s moving. He comforts himself by looking towards the sea and imagining escape. Time is difficult to keep track of; Paul estimates that it’s now late November—though there is no autumn in Vietnam.
Paul thinks back to key events: Oscar’s birthday in July and Billy Boy Watkins’ death in June. With long, dull days punctuated by horrific events, the chronology is hard to pin down. He wonders, “But what was the order? How did the pieces fit, and into which months? And what was it now—November-the-what?” (47).
He thinks about what he’ll do after the war—return home to Fort Dodge and show his medals to his father, then visit his father’s new housing development. And then he’d take a tour of Europe to visit Paris and “drink red wine in Cacciato’s honor…look for the things Cacciato would have looked for” (48).
Chapter 6 Summary: "Detours on the Road to Paris"
The squad continues to march west, coming across Cacciato’s burned-down breakfast fires and discarded ammunition, but with no sight of him. Doc chants that the war is over. The jungle ends and the landscape opens up into plains. When they find a Black Jack wrapper and see smoke over the next hill, they think they’ve caught Cacciato.
They emerge from a stand of trees into a clearing, and Stink begins firing automatically. There are two water buffalo yoked to a cart; Stink kills one. Blood flows, “[c]hunks of meat and hide kept splattering off the shot-dead buffalo,” and a woman was sobbing, but Stink was grinning, proud of himself” (51). The cart turns out to be full of furniture with three women in it—two old women, both crying, and a girl.
They settle in for the night; Eddie and Doc cover the dead buffalo with branches, and Stink builds a fire. The lieutenant interrogates the girl, Sarkin Aung Wan, while the old women, Sarkin’s aunts, cry. She tells him that they are refugees and asks that they pay reparations for Nguyen, the water buffalo, whom her aunts nursed as a baby. Sarkin’s home was in Cholon. As her mother gave birth to twins, the VC (Viet Cong) executed her father for stealing chickens. Her mother died two years later, and the family dispersed.
The lieutenant asks Sarkin where they are going, and she answers, “The Far West…only as far as refugees go…to go farther would be stupid” (54). She asks him to lead them there. Paul watches the girl and pretends not to as she settles in for sleep. The next morning, they pile onto the cart together—Paul sitting next to Sarkin—and continue west.
Chapter 7 Summary: "Riding the Road to Paris"
They continue to ride pleasantly, with sunny days and restful nights. Paul enjoys riding next to “the pretty girl named Sarkin Aung Wan” (56). The war seems distant; Sarkin asks Paul if it has followed them, and he says he isn’t sure. The aunts cry for Nguyen, the dead water buffalo, each night, but they continue silently each morning.
Sarkin is enthralled by the idea of Paris and tells Paul how much she would like to go with him as she paints her toenails on the cart. The lieutenant refuses to let her travel with them, though—because “[w]e’re still soldiers and this here is still a war” (59)—and resolves to drop them off at the next village. But Paul wants her to come with them, and she persuades him further by showing him her strong, muscled legs and arms. Sarkin says they need her, that she will guide them; Paul insists that Cacciato is their guide.
They move onwards through gorgeous countryside, with the aunts still mourning each night—amusing Eddie, but causing Stink to mutter irritably. They follow a trail of M&Ms at a fork in the road, endure a tropical storm, and shoot quail as they travel along. Then suddenly, one night, Stink hears a rustling in the bushes and tackles Cacciato.
Chapter 8 Summary: "The Observation Post"
At one AM, Paul is supposed to wake Doc for his turn on watch. Instead, he climbs down from the tower and walks to the sea. “It was his bravest moment” (62). He urinates, wades a bit, washes his face, hands, and hair, and gets out of the water. He observes the tower from below and thinks how rickety it looks.
Paul feels calm and in control. He resumes his post on top of the tower at one-twenty. He remembers what his father told him before he left: to look for the good things. Thinking about the road to Paris is his “way of looking for the best of all possible outcomes” (64). So he calls in the status report and continues to do so.
Chapters 4-8 Analysis
Chapter 4 jumps back to the beginning of Paul’s time in Vietnam. His training (what little there is of it) highlights the unfair and arbitrary nature of war, as well as the impossibility of truly preparing for it. Support personnel vastly outnumber combat soldiers, so the fact that Paul is going into battle at all feels like the worst, most improbable luck. And the officer’s method of “killing” them on the pretend minefield violates Paul’s sense of fairness, even while it mirrors how randomly men will die in battle. Yet there is no way to prepare for war. The corporal’s lecture on how to survive consists only of silence—perhaps implying that there is no way to survive, or that survival comes from introspection. So the war doesn’t really begin for Paul until the first day he goes into the combat zone.
And just as the war begins in these chapters, the trip to Paris truly begins as well. The men have decided they are going forward, and Harold Murphy, who isn’t willing to do so, has turned back. The presence of Sarkin Aung Wan and her aunts also changes the character of the trip. Stink fires automatically and enthusiastically when he sees the others in the clearing—the natural response of a soldier. But once Sarkin and her aunts—civilian Vietnamese women—join them the trip can no longer be viewed as a strictly military expedition.
This is exactly what the lieutenant pushes back against in Chapter 7; if they’re still soldiers fighting a war, the women can’t travel with them. And though Paul insists that Cacciato is the real leader of the trip, as he’s the one they’re pursuing, he becomes drawn to the idea of Paris for completely different reasons when Sarkin wants him to take her there.
The aunts play a more minor role than Sarkin, but they add a different dimension to the narrative, representing Vietnamese civilians and the grief they feel over the war. When Stink kills their buffalo, who is like a child to them, their grief mirrors the grief that many Vietnamese people surely feel as a result of American soldiers’ actions during the war. The squad has to confront that in a way they don’t in battle.
The observation post chapters, 5 and 8, show how healing it is for Paul to imagine this trip to Paris. The events of the war are so traumatic that he cannot hold them in his mind long enough to put them in order. He can only look forward to the end of the war when he might go to Paris. By imagining their pursuit of Cacciato, he’s able to go to Paris immediately, and it instantly improves his state of mind. In Chapter 8, he leaves his post to venture into the ocean, an act that’s both brave and soothing, and he’s much calmer than he is in Chapter 5.
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