Cacciato

I enjoyed Cacciato. O'Brien's got a good ear for dialog.

Seems to me that falling (more or less) into Laos has a lot of parallels in that war -- when the troops did go out of Vietnam, many of them did go into Cambodia, against whom we were officially not fighting. I vividly recall an LA Times story headed something like "TROOPS OUT OF VIETNAM," with the little Cambodia detail buried back on page 16 or so.

The Lewis Carroll reference is pretty resonant for the time. There's the obvious recall of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which would be almost exactly contemporary with Paul's entry into the military (maybe as much as a year off; I'd have to check) But more importantly, the whole mirrors game issue of logic was something a lot of people were going through. As of the mid-60's, Americans were more convinced that our leaders had good intention than we have been since, and possibly more than we had been at any time before Pearl Harbor.

Paul considers loyalties and contingencies. Save Cacciato? Arrest him? Join him? Are we trying to catch him or trying not to? Who deserts whom? Insofar as he does decide, he does so in a swelter of dreams. We have every reason to suppose he originally allowed himself to be drafted in a similar swelter.

I find the ending supposition that his loyalty is to the people immediately around him, not to a political idea or whatever, realistic enough, but otherwise unconvincing. Paul's fantasy of the Vietnamese officer in his rabbit hole and the hippie chick from UCSD that Paul's buddies rob in Greece or wherever it was seem among the least articulated of Paul's fantasies. The asian girl who serves for romantic interest en route to Paris seems appropriately dreamlike, very realistic as a dream, but not otherwise. Paul doesn't understand them; perhaps O'Brien doesn't either, but I'd hate to speculate.

The placement of this theory that one maintains loyalty to one's confreres gains a lot of strength -- too much, it seems to me -- from its placement right near the end of Paul's fantasies, as it is, right as he starts to come back down. Clearly it is at the very least the basis for Paul's decision, if not O'Brien's. It bothers me. O'Brien has clearly shown the separations of fate internal to the group by the natural fragging of the stubborn lieutenant, for example. Arithmetically, he has to be eliminated; it's a number of lives thing. On the other hand, he has clearly shown sympathy outside the group. If O'Brien has anything against the Cong, he doesn't show it here. He doesn't seem to understand them as a political unit, but perhaps that's because he's writing out of a POV strongly tied to Paul Berlin.

Still, Paul's neutral treatment of unmotivated wholesale murder rankles, and his "We weren't duped" sort of reflections smack suspiciously of an authorial summation, and a sour one at that, as though O'Brien may find himself reluctant to acknowledge that he himself sacrificed for a political manoevre involving massive murder and vandalism that was motivated by something very different than loyalty to his small group of friends.

But I suppose it's Cacciato himself that poses such questions, though mutely. Perhaps O'Brien makes some judgment on the larger political motivations like ideology, greed, and powerlust by so resolutely ignoring them. But I can't help but feel that O'Brien or someone might have woven one other level of sense into all this, as engaging as it is already.