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Going After Cacciato

s imposed upon the Vietnamese people. This is typical ofnovels from this time; they all exhibit a bold ethnocentricism (Lomperis 5). However, the first chapter does contain one very powerful image of destruction from theVietnamese viewpoint, which helps to make this somber portrait of the Vietnam War morecomplete. We are told that Berlin and his squad are taking refuge inside a nearly ruined Buddhistpagoda: ...in shadows was the cross-legged Buddha, smiling from its elevated stone perch. The pagoda was cold. Dank from a month of rain, the place smelled of clays and silicates and dope and old incense. It was a single square room built like a pillbox with stone walls and a flat ceiling that forced the men to stoop or kneel. Once it might have been a fine house of worship, but now it was junk. Sandbags blocked the windows. Bits of broken pottery lay under chipped pedestals. The buddha’s right arm was missing, but the smile was intact. Head cocked, the statue seemed interested in the lieutenant’s long sigh. (O’Brien 4)In this otherwise very American novel, which focuses on the American soldiers’ experiences,feelings, and minds (Lomperis 63), and in which Vietnam is presented primarily as merely a terrainand a climate, this image of the pagoda seems to be symbolic of the country of Vietnam at thistime. Invaded, desecrated, nearly destroyed, it still endured, sustained by a culture and aspirituality against which the war and the American warriors seem unimportant and small.Some critics have thought that Going After Cacciato is “not an antiwar novel” (Vannatta246; McCaffery 145), but surely they must be incorrect. If, as the common thread of thinkingamong critics suggests, that this novel is preoccupied with memory and especially imagination,then surely the overwhelming horror occupying the memories and imaginations of the Americanwarriors, and especially our...

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