If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

The narrator looks back to his upbringing in small-town Minnesota. He remarks on his family's tradition of military service, saying, "I grew out of one war and into another" (11). Both his parents served in World War II, his father in the Pacific and his mother as a WAVE, in the women's Naval Reserve. O'Brien also "grew out of" World War II in that he was a member of "the Baby Boom," the many children born to returning service personnel in the years just after World War II.

O'Brien describes a stable, conventional childhood in the small towns of southern Minnesota. He followed baseball, he rode rides at the fair, he picnicked and watched firecrackers on the Fourth of July. In the midst of all this Americana, he also mentions the land he grew up on was once "Indian land" (12).

He was slightly set apart from other boys in his hometown. He "couldn't hit a baseball" and he was "too small for football" (12). Instead, he took up books, and he read widely and deeply: Plato and Aristotle, the psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm, and the theologian Paul Tillich, along with lighter fare like the Hardy Boys. O’Brien also shows his skeptical side in this chapter. He gently mocks Tillich's cumbersome vocabulary of "Being-itself," and he looks askance at party politics (15). After graduating high school, he leaves for college. 

The narrative shifts again in time. It is now the summer of 1968, and recent college grad O'Brien has received his induction notice, meaning he will be drafted into the military. However, he doesn't have to go right away, and spends the summer in his hometown, abstractly debating the war. He and his friends "drive a car around and around the lake, talking about the war, very seriously" (17). Their conversations are "spiked with references to the philosophers and academicians of war" (17).

O'Brien declares to his readers his utter opposition to the war: "I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now, that the war was wrong" (18). But his reasoning seems to have had no effect on his will in the summer of 1968. He feels other pressures: self-doubt, "the town, my family, my teachers, a whole history of the prairie" (18).His parents leave the decision to him. He tells his college friends he will "let time decide"(17).

Even while he reasons the war is wrong, duty or inertia pulls him toward it. His progress toward becoming a soldier is fitful and unsteady. He gets his draft date wrong, and he readies himself to report for duty a day early. He realizes the mistake, and in the uselessness of his one-day reprieve, he relives the struggle of his decision all over again. In the basement of his parents' house, he paints anti-war slogans on cardboard, as if for a demonstration, then tears up the signs.

O’Brien reports for duty and takes the oath to serve. He holds himself somewhat apart from the other men, from "all this noise and hearty fare welling" (21). Instead he goes "out alone for a beer," and then "[buys] a book and read[s] it alone in [his]room" (21). His debate about the war has come to a kind of standstill, his arguments "voided by abstention […] by a sort of sleepwalking default" (22).

O'Brien returns to the present day, to the time of his writing the book. He says he has no lessons or themes to deliver; instead, he can only "tell war stories"(23).