If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime Free Trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn More
Kindle Edition
 
   
Sell Back Your Copy
For a $0.45 Gift Card
Trade in
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
 
 
Start reading If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home [Paperback]

Tim O'Brien (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)

List Price: $13.99
Price: $11.16 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $2.83 (20%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it delivered Monday, January 30? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition --  
Hardcover --  
Paperback $11.16  
Mass Market Paperback --  
Unknown Binding --  

Book Description

September 1, 1999
Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.

Frequently Bought Together

If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home + The Jungle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) + Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Price For All Three: $42.70

Show availability and shipping details

Buy the selected items together
  • In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • The Jungle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) $11.68

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade $19.86

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Over time, Tim O'Brien has used both art and artifice to shape his fictional accounts of Vietnam. Award-winning novels such as Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried offer up a surreal view of the war: a soldier who decides to walk to Paris, leaving only a trail of M&M's in his wake; a young man who imports his high-school girlfriend to his base camp high in the jungled mountains, only to lose her to a shadowy squad of Special Forces Green Berets and to "that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure" that was Vietnam. O'Brien's first account of the war, however, was written in the raw, unfiltered months following his return from Southeast Asia in 1969. If I Die in a Combat Zone has all of the eloquence and attention to language and detail that are a mark of the author's work; what is different about it is its straightforward, unembellished depiction of his personal experience of hell.

"When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville--GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai ... you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine."

O'Brien paints an unvarnished portrait of the infantry soldier's life that is at once mundane and terrifying--the endless days of patrolling punctuated by firefights that end as suddenly and inconclusively as they begin; the mind-numbing brutality of burned villages and trampled rice patties; the terror of tunnels, minefields, and the ever-present threat of death. Powerful as these scenes are, perhaps the most memorable chapter in the book concerns his decision to desert just a few weeks before he was sent to Vietnam. "The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't.... I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them, too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run." Tim O'Brien went into the war opposing it and came out knowing exactly why. If I Die in a Combat Zone is more than just a memoir of a disastrous war; it is also a meditation on heroism and cowardice, on the mutability of truth and morality in a war zone and, most of all, on the simple, human capacity to endure the unendurable. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"O'Brien brilliantly and quietly evokes the foot soldier's daily life in the paddies and foxholes, evokes a blind, blundering war. . . . Tim O'Brien writes with the care and eloquence of someone for whom communication is still a vital possibility. . . . A personal document of aching clarity. . . . A beautiful, painful book."
--The New York Times Book Review

"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."
--Minneapolis Star and Tribune

Product Details

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Broadway (September 1, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0767904435
  • ISBN-13: 978-0767904438
  • Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

TIM O'BRIEN received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the acclaimed novels The Things They Carried and July, July. In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. O'Brien lives in Austin, Texas.

 

Customer Reviews

52 Reviews
5 star:
 (28)
4 star:
 (16)
3 star:
 (4)
2 star:
 (2)
1 star:
 (2)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (52 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliantly Written, Searing, Vietnam Memoir, August 20, 2003
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (Paperback)
Tim O'Brien is an extraordinarily talented writer. This painful and disturbing memoir of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam, is a vivid and heartfelt chronicle.

O'Brien "grew out of one war and into another." He is the son of a WWII soldier, "who fought the great campaign against the tyrants of the 1940s." His mother served in the WAVES. Drafted in the summer of 1968, "Nam-bound," O'Brien thought the war was "wrongly conceived and poorly justified," and seriously planned to escape to Canada, or to Sweden. However, his entire history of life on the American prairie, the values instilled in him by parents and teachers, pulled him in another direction. In the end, he submitted. "It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite - inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all." Thus, he articulates, so well, the reasons that many of my generation, far less eloquent than he, went silently off to fight a war they did not believe in - and too many never returned.

As a woman from the "Vietnam generation," this book was very painful to read. Yet, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I was still a girl, in so many ways, when Tim O'Brien landed in Vietnam. And he, and our peers, were still boys. I will always feel wonder at their courage - even if they did not feel particularly courageous. How did the regular guys I graduated school with, manage to shoot and be shot at? If there are any answers to my questions about what happened "over there" and why, this book gives me a pretty good idea. I travel into combat with the author, walk over minefields, feel the red earth of Vietnam, as he digs eternal holes to lie in at night. I also feel some of his horror, pain, disillusionment, and admire his dark humor.

O'Brien writes beautifully, with great sensitivity, of that terrible time. "Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Courage, January 9, 2001
By 
booknblueslady (Woodland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (Paperback)
A thinking man in Vietnam was a dangerous thing. Being a soldier in Vietnam was a dangerous thing. Tim O'Brien was both and somehow he managed to live to survive it and tell his story. He ends up in Vietnam after unsuccessfully dealing with his conflict between doing the right thing and being a courageous man. He tells of his decision not to follow his well planned escape route and stay with his country and its proposal to send him to Viet Nam. O'Brien describes Vietnam as a place with nameless soldiers and Buddys, faceless enemies and endless minefields.

This is an excellent text for learning about the experience of the Vietnam war, the choices that young man were faced with at that time and basic dilemmas in making moral decisions. It is a well written book which makes for a quick, satisfying read.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars exceptional!, March 29, 2001
By 
Jeff (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (Paperback)
This is an excellent piece of literature. O'Brien is at his finest as he transcribes his experiences during the vietnam war. If you read "The Things They Carried" (which he wrote after this) you'll definately love this book. It's also interesting to observe some of the similarities to the characters in this memoir to those in The Things They Carried. It's exceptional, honestly. You wont be disappointed.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews











Only search this product's reviews



Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
It's incredible, it really is, isn't it? Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
rear job, track commander, paddy dike, firing device, night position, third platoon
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Alpha Company, Mad Mark, Captain Johansen, Viet Cong, Captain Smith, Major Callicles, Chu Lai, Fort Lewis, Tri Binh, Chieu Hoi, Colonel Daud, Charlie Company, North Vietnamese, Batangan Peninsula, Buddy Barker, South China Sea, United States Army, World War, Bouncing Betties, Bouncing Betty, Frederic Henry, Nouc Mau, South Vietnam, Buddy Greco, Buddy Wolf
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:



Books on Related Topics (learn more)
 
Patriots by Christian G. Appy
Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien
 

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(4)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums





Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject