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 27-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary: "Flights of Imagination"
The train to Kabul moves quickly as the men sleep comfortably, climbing high into snowy mountains. When he wakes up, Lieutenant Corson keeps asking where he is. The landscape makes Paul think of Lake Country, their name for the battle in the mountains. Paul lay on the ground, twitching, as they bombed the mountain. When Lieutenant Sidney Martin ordered the advance, they found the dead scattered everywhere, and they had to count the bodies. The constant rain filled the craters made by bombs, so Doc called it Lake Country. They found tunnels that all had to be searched, and Oscar began to discuss a solution to the problem of Lieutenant Martin.
They spend the night at the mayor’s house in Ovissil while the train tracks are being mended. The mayor tells histories instead of fortunes. He tells the lieutenant’s history, how he was once a captain but lost the rank due to “indulgence and simple misfortune” (179). Paul asks to have his history told, but the mayor says he is too young to have a real history. The mayor sends them off the next morning with a sack of dried lamb, waving while their train pulls away.
Chapter 28 Summary: "The Observation Post"
Paul thinks about his history: “His father built houses, his mother buried strong drink in her garden” (180). He’d played baseball, gone canoeing, gone to camp and gotten lost in the woods. He was a good student, but his teachers noted that he was a daydreamer. He threw rocks in the river and imagined being rich one day. Louise Wiertsma was almost his girlfriend; he’d only pretended to kiss her. He earned twenty-eight credits at Centerville Junior College before dropping out. He built houses with his father one summer and cruised down Main Street in his father’s car at night. At twenty, he went to war. “Sure, he had a history” (101).
Chapter 29 Summary: "Atrocities on the Road to Paris"
They celebrate Christmas in Tehran, stealing a tree from the Shah’s National Memorial Garden. The lieutenant is sick with dysentery into January, but Doc says that his real, underlying illness is nostalgia—“the pain of returning home” (183)—and that time is the best cure. They don’t find any clues as to Cacciato’s whereabouts, and they generally stay at the boardinghouse.
“Then they are arrested. It happened only minutes after the beheading” (184). They are out walking when they see a large crowd around a platform; they go to investigate. A police van pulls up, and a young man with his hands bound behind him gets out and mounts the platform. “Watch this,” Doc tells Paul. “Your fine expedition to Paris, all the spectacular spectacles along the way. Civilization. You watch this shit” (186). On the platform, a solider shaves the young man’s neck. As they lead the boy to the block, Paul sees that a fly has landed on the boy’s nose—both Paul and the young man desperately want it to be gone; it’s all they can focus on. Then the axeman steps forward and the boy’s head drops. The squad goes to get drinks, and Oscar and Doc discuss how such actions are the price for keeping the peace.
After drinks, Stink wants clams. Oscar asks a cop where to find some, and they’re arrested and taken to police headquarters where an officer named Fahyi Rhallon questions them. He asks to see their passports, if they are tourists. Doc explains that they are touring soldiers who do not have to carry passports under the Mutual Military Travel Pact of 1965, ratified in Geneva. Doc says that this treaty also covers Sarkin Aung Wan. Captain Rhallon chides himself for not knowing of this treaty and offers to buy them drinks by way of apology. He leads them to a basement club where they can “enforce curfew” (195).
Captain Rhallon asks about the war, and Doc tells him it’s the same as any war. The captain insists that every soldier has his own story to tell. Doc says Vietnam isn’t special, not “a big aberration in the history of American wars” because “the feel of the war is the same in Nam or Okinawa—the emotions are the same, the same fundamental stuff is seen and remembered” (197). Doc doesn’t believe that purpose matters to soldiers on the ground; they’re just trying to stay alive.
The captain argues that purpose is what keeps soldiers from running away and Paul looks away uncomfortably. Oscar goes to dance, and Eddie and Stink soon follow. Doc says it’s self-respect and fear, not purpose, that keeps them from running. He explains their mission, that they are chasing Cacciato to Paris. Captain Rhallon believes this mission has great purpose; he says the boy who was executed that day was being punished for going AWOL.
The other men come back to the table and start discussing military strategy. Paul gets up to dance with Sarkin. The talk turns to war stories, and Oscar urges Doc to tell the captain about Billy Boy Watkins. Paul doesn’t want to hear that story and goes outside. Sarkin follows him, and they walk through empty streets, holding hands. She kisses him and tells him the story was silly.
Chapter 30 Summary: "The Observation Post"
Paul bets himself that it’s ten ‘til four; he looks at his watch, and it’s eight ‘til. He can tell time by the wind and sky and sea and sand. He wonders why his imagination took him to a beheading, instead of only happy events.
He tries to remember the order of everything, how far Cacciato had led them, and who had died when: “Billy Boy…then Rudy Chassler who broke the quiet…then later Frenchie Tucker, followed in minutes by Bernie Lynn. Then Lake Country…where Ready Mix died….And then Buff. Then Sidney Martin. Then Pederson” (206). He pulls out the starlight scope and watches the night sky. As he observes, he thinks back to his first day at war, the day of “the ultimate war story” (207).
Chapters 27-30 Analysis
The pleasant sense of home from the previous chapters has now darkened. The mayor reveals Lieutenant Corson’s history to be an unfortunate one. In Chapter 27, Paul is unable to completely give himself over to the fantasy; the imagined landscape reminds him of the real war. Paul insists that he, too, has a history in Chapter 28, but the events he discusses—childhood activities, his almost girlfriend, driving his father’s car—only emphasize how unformed it is. But he must survive the war for his life to expand further.
Though Paul doesn’t think about the war explicitly in Chapter 29, its violence pervades the chapter. They watch a boy being beheaded, and later learn that it was punishment for going AWOL—another manifestation of Paul’s guilt. Paul is obsessed with the indignity of the fly on the boy’s nose; one can only imagine that wartime deaths are similarly undignified, a reality that he clearly fears. Doc forces Paul to watch, telling him that it’s civilization, the same word that Paul used to describe the bustling order of Mandalay. The question of how much violence is necessary for civilization to exist is one for debate: Are executions necessary? Is war?
Later, at the club, Doc gives a different perspective on the war than the one Lieutenant Carson offers in Chapter 23. He believes that all wars are the same to the soldiers on the ground and that purpose doesn’t matter. It is debatable whether Paul would feel better about the atrocities of war if the Vietnam War were one with a more coherent moral purpose, but he does seem to be driven by fear as Doc suggests.
When the war threatens to invade Paul’s fantasy again in the form of the ultimate war story, he leaves with Sarkin rather than hear it. But back on the observation post, he is ready to confront it, listing the deaths again and preparing to retell the story to himself. The fact that the story occurred on his first day at war—a gruesome initiation—surely makes it harder for him to bear.
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