Introduction
For our cultural and New Historicist edition of Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, we
attempted to accomplish several things. Overall, our goal was to provide readers of Going After
Cacciato with contextual information on important themes surrounding the psychological trauma
experienced by the protagonist, Paul Berlin, in the text. Specifically, we took into consideration
soldier drug use in the theater of war and its potential adverse affects, the establishment of Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder as a diagnosable mental state associated for the first time with
veterans of the Vietnam War, and the response and reactions of citizens in the United States to
the war itself as well as the soldiers who fought in it. These topics are of particular interest with
regards to the storyline of Going After Cacciato because they relate directly to or have a direct
effect on the mental distress felt by all soldiers of modern war, but came into prominence in the
Vietnam Era.
Drug use, expressly marijuana, is mentioned in Going After Cacciato throughout the
novel and always nonchalantly, as something the men did together and shared with each other.
To contextualize this widespread drug usage and provide perspective on what effect soldier's
drug use had on blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, we will be including first hand
accounts of soldiers experiences with regards to drug use as well as historical documentation
done by scholars.
Although Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-like symptoms have been recognized in combat
veterans of nearly every military conflict in history, the modern understanding of Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder dates from the 1970s, and stems largely from the mental problems experienced
by US military veterans of the Vietnam War. In Going After Cacciato, Paul Berlin narrates
readers through many occurrences of his own breaks from reality, which likely arise due to his
part in the fragging of Sidney Martin and myriad other psychological stresses involved with
being in a war zone.
The state of the American psyche during the Vietnam era is also worth considering when
reading Going After Cacciato. Our investigation into the mindset of Americans back in the
United States at the time provides an interesting context to Paul Berlin's recollections of his
home and family. Newspaper articles, editorials and other materials are included to help place
Going After Cacciato into the larger American socio-historical frame of mind at the time.
From a scholarly or academic viewpoint, the critical portion of our New Historicist
edition of Going After Cacciato aims to highlight the debates surrounding the text with regards
to the psychological issues mentioned above. Our research includes sources that examines traits
like bravery and cowardice; the revelation that the land of Vietnam itself is the enemy; two
articles that discuss how the Vietnam War was unlike any other prior war, and subsequently,
how unprepared American soldiers were for their experiences; the last article included links
Going After Cacciato to one of the major assumptions of New Historicism: that expressive acts
like literature are embedded in society's material and cultural practices (Veeser, xi).
By choosing to focus on the psychological aspects of Going After Cacciato, we hope to
renegotiate the relationship between the text itself and other signifying practices of the time
(Veeser, xii). One of the primary goals of New Historicists is to ask not "What happened?" but
"How has the event been interpreted...[and] what [can that] tell us about the interpreters?"
(Tyson, 282). There are interpretations being made regarding the Vietnam War and its
implications even in contemporary society. These, along with numerous other long held
prevailing ideologies, require further examination as New Historicists, who believe "that no
discourse by itself can adequately explain the complex cultural dynamics" of any given even, can
do (Tyson, 285).