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Tim O'BrienIf I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1973A 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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Arrival”
O'Brien lands in Vietnam. It's another new beginning, "much like arriving at boot camp like a recruit" (70). His "new home" is LZ (landing zone) Gator, home of the Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry. Within the Forty-Sixth, O'Brien is assigned to Alpha Company, and, within that, to the Third Platoon.
Everyone has different, contradictory advice for O'Brien and his fellow recruits. One sergeant says the new recruits will soon be sent out to "the boonies" to see some action (71). Another sergeant tells O'Brien to forget that: "No sense sending you out there now […][g]o see a movie tonight, get a beer or something" (74). One night, soon after their arrival, LZ Gator is attacked. Some of the seasoned soldiers sleep through the mortar fire. In the morning, two American soldiers are found dead on the perimeter of the LZ.
Like the advice about the odds of getting killed, the soldiers' views on the mortar attack are contradictory. Some call it a "lark" and contrast it with the "really bad shit" they've seen before (77). A soldier calling himself "the Kid" claims the attack must be taken seriously (77). Regardless of their views, all the seasoned soldiers agree O'Brien is an FNG, or "fucking new guy." O'Brien the FNG poses questions to the Kid, desperate to figure out his chances of survival. The Kid shrugs the questions off with "smiling non-answers," and tells O'Brien it’s "best not to worry" (78).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Alpha Company”
O'Brien recounts his first month with Alpha Company, which is "mostly a vacation" (79). When the company is on the move, it is trailed by "prostitutes and girls" as well as some children working as valets or packhorses (80). O'Brien learns the lingo and the nicknames of the company. He encounters the platoon leader, Mad Mark, who is a Green Beret, a member of the US Army's Special Forces. He is a calm, brave, professional soldier. O'Brien emphasizes that Mark does not expose the platoon to unnecessary risk: "Mad Mark was not a fanatic" (82).
The soldiers lounge around, flirt with women, and learn some Vietnamese. O'Brien remarks that it “was not a bad war" (83),but this changes with a night patrol to a village called Tri Binh 4. O'Brien is not on the patrol, but he is there when the patrol unit returns. The Kid is exultant, triumphant: "Jesus, we gave 'em hell" (83). They have even brought back a severed ear as a trophy. The night patrol is followed by air support; for an hour, the village of Tri Binh 4 is strafed with gunfire and rockets. The next day, another patrol is sent to the village, which is by then a scene of devastation. There are "dead animals" scattered around, and the body of the man whose ear was severed still lies there (84).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Ambush”
Alpha Company sets out for a night-time ambush, led by Mad Mark. They have intelligence that "Charlie" (the American nickname for the Viet Cong enemy) is in the area. The company leaves at midnight, tromping along, canteens clattering. Mad Mark calls for quiet. Along the way, O'Brien recalls a long narrative dream he once had, about a prison escape and a beautiful woman.
The men are paired into teams of two; one sleeps while the other keeps watch, and then they switch. O'Brien is partnered with "a kid [the unit] called Reno" (90). Reno is a squad leader, and he makes O'Brien do a bit more than his share of keeping watch.
O'Brien experiments with ways to pass the time: recalling a beautiful woman, reciting a poem, counting the days he has left in Vietnam. He also makes plans to write about the war. His war book will allow him to "get even with some people"(93). He will expose the drill sergeants' evil, and Reno's carelessness. He ponders the apparent simplicity and directness of the men in Ernest Hemingway's World War I short stories:"Hemingway's soldiers […] are cynics," O’Brien says, "resigned to bullets and brawn" (93). O'Brien is more divided. He wonders about soldiers who believe, as he does, that "their battle is not only futile but also dead wrong" (93).
O'Brien then turns his thoughts to plans for travel. He recalls his visit to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1967, during which he got into a debate about the Vietnam War with a genial, cultured economics student from North Vietnam. Their talk is civil and wide-ranging. At the end, the economics student reveals he is a lieutenant in the North Vietnamese Army, meaning O'Brien could come face to face with him. The ambush ends with no enemy contact.
O'Brien next recounts another Alpha Company ambush, this one in May. They spot some North Vietnamese soldiers, "silhouettes […] tiptoeing out of the hamlet" (97). This was "the first and only time [O’Brien] would ever see the living enemy" (97).O'Brien feels no hatred, but he does feel fear, and he fires his rifle. In the morning, they come upon the body of one of the North Vietnamese soldiers. O'Brien refuses to look. Later, two men of the Third Platoon are blown up by a mine as they sweep the area. O'Brien calls it "Alpha Company's most successful ambush" (98).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Arriving in Vietnam is like starting over in basic training, O'Brien says. To give readers this same sense of disorientation, O'Brien doesn't explain everything. He recounts in Chapter 7 that he is called an FNG, but he doesn't explain the meaning of the acronym until a later chapter, so readers are left to work it out for themselves, just like an FNG would be.
The ear trophy is a storied Vietnam War trope; everyone who's heard about the Vietnam War has heard the allegation that American soldiers cut ears off the dead Viet Cong. O'Brien, however, was a participant in the war, not a consumer of Vietnam War books and Vietnam War movies. The severed ear shocks him. When he wakes during the night, his first thought is of the ear: "Smoke continued to billow over to our position all night, and when I awakened every hour, it was the first thing […] to remind me of the ear" (84). His restlessness and his inability to forget about the ear show how shocked he is.
There is a long tradition of thinking up singular nicknames for the enemy army. The British called the German forces Jerry in World Wars One and Two. The name "Charlie" singularizes the hordes of unseen Viet Cong guerilla fighters. Like Jerry, "Charlie" is a diminutive form, as if the Americans faced a cute and childish and ultimately harmless enemy. The nickname serves to minimize the danger.
In Vietnam, American forces faced an enemy army of guerilla fighters and also civilians sympathetic to the Viet Cong. The Americans had the advantage, in terms of weaponry and money, but the Viet Cong knew the land and how to lay traps for American soldiers. O'Brien describes, in later chapters, how they mainly indirectly encountered the enemy, in the form of booby traps and mines the Viet Cong left behind. The use of the singular name, "Charlie," makes it sound like there's just one guy they need to track down and have it out with, once and for all.
This fantasy of a single combat with just one man continues in the anecdote about Li, the economics student O’Brien meets. Two cultured men from warring nations—the United States and North Vietnam—have a reasonable, sincere, open-minded debate in Prague in 1967. The educated O'Brien and the equally-educated Li are like aristocratic officers of old, recognizing in each other their equal. In 1969, on the battlefield, when O'Brien sees a dead Viet Cong soldier, he says, "I hoped the dead man was not named Li" (98). He is sincere in that hope, but it's as though he also hopes the dead man is named Li, as a singular enemy with a name would somehow be more reassuring compared to a faceless, nameless enemy.
In Chapter 1, during the first combat recounted in the book, Barney and O'Brien lie on the backs, frightened, not firing their guns, hoping for the bullets to pass them by. In the two ambushes described in Chapter 9, O'Brien does take part: "Johansen fired. I fired" (98). But in other ways, the combat is entirely futile; it seems to consist of wanton property destruction and rare, fleeting encounters with the enemy. As O'Brien remarks of the mop-up operation in Chapter 8, "We searched Tri Binh 4, then burned most of it down" (84). The ambush O'Brien ironically describes in Chapter 9 as their "most successful ambush" results in one dead VC and multiple dead Americans (98).
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