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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: "Falling Through a Hole in the Road to Paris"
They fall and fall down the hole. Paul holds Sarkin’s hand, and she is smiling. The men fall past them—the lieutenant spread-eagled, Stink laughing, Doc waving, Oscar posing like a diver, Eddie yodeling. Paul wets his pants as he falls. Sarkin tells him, “I knew you’d find a way!” (83). They finally land softly in a narrow tunnel of red stone that’s lit by torches. Paul can’t stop laughing.
They walk single file down the tunnel. The old women, cart, and buffalo have vanished. The tunnel eventually empties into a chamber where a man in a green uniform and a pith hat sits with his back to them, looking into a large periscope. The lieutenant puts his rifle against the man’s neck and tells him not to move, but the man turns around and welcomes them.
The man is Li Van Hgoc—Van—a major in the Vietcong Battalion. Van ignores the rifle and leads them into the next room where a banquet is laid out. Paul feels like he’s falling and like he’s still on watch in the tower. This is the first time he’s seen an enemy soldier alive and the first time he’s been in the tunnels—he might have gone in the tunnel instead of Bernie Lynn, but he didn’t. Paul feels like he’s falling, but he isn’t afraid.
Paul asks Van dozens of questions while everyone else except Sarkin sleeps: how they hide, what motivates them, whether they could fly, where they bury their dead, whether Van saw Frenchie Tucker’s death, and so on. Van tells him that the land is the real enemy; that the principle of Xa means their spirit is in the land, and that landmines and tunnels are the land’s way of defending itself. Xa “means community, and soil, and home…earth and sky and even sacredness” (86).
Van takes Paul on a tour of the tunnels and leads him to the periscope where Paul sees men standing around the mouth of a tunnel. They’re fuzzy, though, and Paul can’t quite make them out.
Chapter 14 Summary: "Upon Almost Winning the Silver Star"
The men hear Frenchie Tucker get shot. They stand around the mouth of the tunnel and wait to see if he’ll come out. Oscar mutters his dissatisfaction about searching the tunnels instead of just blowing them up. Lieutenant Sidney Martin tells him that it’s a war. Frenchie was supposed to have taken the next helicopter out to get his blood pressure checked; he liked discussing politics; he was a large man who had to wiggle into the tunnel. The lieutenant had told him he had to go down or he would be court-martialed.
After waiting for a while, the lieutenant tells them that someone has to go down after Frenchie. Stink says to give him more time, but the lieutenant insists. Stink goes to the perimeter, sits on his helmet, and smokes; Eddie and Vaught go with him. Doc looks through his medic’s bag. Pederson, Buff, and Rudy Chassler sidle into the hedges.
Lieutenant Sidney Martin says that someone has to go. Stink suggests, “Send down the gremlin…Send Cacciato down” (90). Cacciato smiles and starts to remove his pack, but Oscar says no. Paul tries not to look at anyone. Finally, Bernie, who put insecticide in Frenchie’s canteen at one point, swears and goes in the tunnel headfirst. His feet are still sticking out when he’s shot; Doc and Oscar pull him out before Bernie even has time to sweat. Bernie’s eyes are open, and he says, “Holy Moses” (90).
Chapter 15 Summary: "Tunneling Toward Paris"
Van brings down the periscope and tells Paul that “things may be viewed from many angles. From down below, or from inside out, you often discover entirely new understandings” (91). He then leads Paul into a room that looks like a patio at morning where everyone is eating breakfast. After breakfast, Van and Lieutenant Corson walk together and discuss the military.
Lieutenant Corson tells Van that it is time for them to go and asks him to show them the way out. Van explains that this is a problem because they are all prisoners of war, and the rules that make them so cannot be changed. The lieutenant notes that Van is “[o]utmanned, outgunned, and outtechnologized” (93). Van is delighted when the lieutenant tells him that he has a solution but is confused when the lieutenant points his rifle at Van.
Stink ties Van up with strips of curtain, and the men form teams to destroy the supplies and technology stockpiled in the tunnel. Van only protests when the lieutenant destroys the periscope, insisting, “This only makes things more difficult. Each thing broken makes the puzzle more difficult” (94). The lieutenant demands to know the way out, but Van insists he doesn’t know. Van looks fifty, but he’s only twenty-eight. He had a promising future until he was drafted. He ran away but was captured and sentenced to spend ten years in the tunnels. Van tells the men that they are all prisoners.
Van is resigned to living out his sentence in the tunnels, and the men start to lose hope of finding a way out. Then Sarkin proclaims, “The way in is the way out” (97-98) and tells them they can fall out as they fell in. The men prepare to leave, and the lieutenant offers to bring Van as well. However, Van believes it’s worse out there. So they walk, not knowing whether they’re going up or down, and they crawl when the passage narrows. It feels like it’s taking days. They have to sleep in shifts so someone can shoo away the rats, and Paul wonders what went wrong.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
These chapters further expand on the significance of the tunnels. Chronologically, Chapter 14 takes place before Chapter 9. The reader learns that anyone, including Paul, could have gone into the tunnel instead of Bernie and been shot. Bernie is awarded the Silver Star posthumously; he has been officially declared brave. Paul wants this for himself, but he’s too frightened to go into the tunnel. One can ask whether that’s a wise form of cowardice, since he was almost certain to die. This could possibly be the “different angle” Van refers to when he shows Paul this scene in the periscope in Chapter 15. Cacciato is the only other soldier willing to go in, which underscores his childlike simplicity and his goodness.
The trip into the tunnel on the way to Paris, in Chapters 13 and 15 is joyful instead of scary. Paul is laughing as he falls, and while he soils himself as he does in the first chapter, he isn’t ashamed of it, and Sarkin is able to comfort him. Though a Viet Cong soldier is in the tunnel, they are able to overpower him easily, and they walk out of the tunnel while he is still trapped there.
They don’t simply overpower Van, though; they bond with him. This is the first living Vietnamese soldier that Paul has encountered, and he is able to ask him all the questions he has about their people and culture. Van suggests that they are really all the same, all prisoners. He didn’t want to fight in the war any more than Paul did. And he argues that the land is the real enemy. While the land certainly didn’t grow the landmines, Van is right in the sense that the fault lies with a power higher than the individual soldiers.
The fall into the tunnel is also notable for its surreal quality; while the novel has employed elements of surrealism in earlier chapters, this mode is not fully realized until Chapter 13. The fall alludes to the trip down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, a comparison in which Cacciato might be the White Rabbit Alice pursues, or perhaps the Cheshire Cat with his round face and ready smile.
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