Tim O"Brien's novel If I Die in a Combat Zone (1970) is a personal document of the war in Vietnam, and his own emotions and feeling towards war. O"Brien found his inspiration through everyday activities of a soldier in the Vietnam War. The Things They Carried (1990) was also about the Vietnam War. In this novel O"Brien used fictional stories as well as personal emotions that he felt to help him write. It depicts war's worst side, the way it could change a person. In the Vietnam War novels If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried, Tim O"Brien focuses on the horrifying experience of this war, and the human frailty, insanity, and fear of being a soldier.
If I Die in a Combat Zone is an autobiographical book about a foot soldier that survived the war. The chapters are depicted with great detail of the experiences of a young man who is drafted, trained, and sent to war. O"Brien is a reluctant soldier and morally opposed to the war. He makes plans to ditch the war for Scandinavia, but they fall through due to his morals and indecisive thinking, which makes his writing so believable (Waters). .
"It was an intellectual and physical stand-off, and I did not have the energy to see it to the end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even observer of the 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 inevitable chaos, censure, and embarrassment." (O"Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone 22).
The next thing he knew he was being shipped off to Vietnam where he joined the Alpha Company. The Alpha Company was stationed outside Chu Lai. The territory patrolled by Alpha Company was frightening and forbidding. The terrain was unfamiliar to the solders. The Viet Cong were hard to fight, rarely showing themselves. O"Brien brilliantly and quietly evokes the foot soldier's daily life in the paddies and foxholes, and evokes a blind and blundering war.
