Yet he concluded that, although he knew this war was just as insane as any other war, he should not run away from his duty. He stayed in the war, because of his personal obligations to society. Not out of idealism, but merely because his people expected him to. In novels dealing with Vietnam we often see veterans coming back into the American society (like in Caputo's Indian Country), but here we are confronted with the country itself. The novel Going after Cacciato deals with the journey to Paris an American soldier fantasizes about. It is November 1968 and Spec. Four Paul Berlin is in his observation tower in Quang Ngai, Vietnam, by the South China Sea, performing his tour of duty, which lasts 365 days for the common grunt, the foot soldier he is. He feels he has come to Nam in another way than soldiers had gone to the Second World War and to Korea. His lieutenant, Lt Corson had been in Korea, and he was looking back to it with nostalgia: "In Korea, by God, the people liked us. Know what I …show more content…
No order. (p.255) When Paul realizes this, the main question for him is how to determine his own place in it. As he does not know an anwer, the possibility, or rather the necessity of dreaming something else in the face of horror, is brought to Vietnam. He starts to think about Cacciato. This bloke fishes in the world's Great Lake Country where everybody says there is no fish. He dutifully goes through all the motions and all of a sudden het gets out, and Paul is intrigued. Paul's squad is sent to go after Cacciato. They are following the unmarked character and find him more and more almost a holy character, less defined as they go along. Finding him a friendly leader almost, they follow him. From soldier among soldiers, he develops into a friendly symbolical figure pointing the way. The seductiveness of Cacciato leads them on. He sheds his war implements. He is that annoying, different, seperate chap who bounces the ball, who nobody can trace and think of, who does not really exist, he has not even got a first name! Cacciato, that just fulfills. Going after Cacciato means "going after a dream", following that dream, but it can also mean "going after to actually get that dream". Time and time again there is this ambiguity of going on the hunt after Cacciato, or following the Italian on desertion; there is the choice between reality and dream for Paul. Cacciato, who nobody has actually seen, has hit upon an idea which his indeterminance made possible,