protagonist, can only be understood as an antiwar statement. And ifat the end of the novel Paul Berlin finds he must return, resigned to the war reality, he makes clearto us that he does so not because of “courage”(Bates 278) or principle but because, like hiscreator, he cannot withstand the societal pressures of family and country and is afraid of theisolation and hardship that opposition to them would impose (322-23)–an understandable buthardly a pro-war stance.As for O’Brien himself, he has frequently said that war is a complex affair, especially forthose who must face it directly, but his prevailing view has become increasingly explicit. Forinstance, shortly after this novel was published, he said that his main concern in it was “to havereaders care about what’s right and wrong and about the difficulty of doing right, the difficulty ofsaying no to war” (Schroeder 146). Several years later, speaking at the Asia Society conferencein 1985, he was even more forthright: “Wouldn’t all of us admit that a mistake was made inVietnam?... we misunderstood Vietnamese history...and we were shooting anyway” (Lomperis73). Both the novel and the author condemn this war. And it is in this novel’s first, crucialchapter that such views are most clearly embodied, molding all the rest....
