By turns lurid and lyrical, "Going After Cacciato" combines a surface of realistic war reportage … with a deeper level—perhaps possible only in fiction—of the surrealistic effect war has on the daydreams and nightmares of the combatants. To call "Going After Cacciato" a novel about war is like calling "Moby Dick" a novel about whales….

[As] the epigraph from Siegfried Sassoon says, "Soldiers are dreamers," and ever so gradually Cacciato's dream of peace becomes the dream of his pursuers until the line between cowardly desertion and righteous pursuit blurs. "Cacciato" in Italian means "hunted" or "caught": the novel concerns the way in which the hunters are caught in a vision of life far from the horrors of war.

In the process, the pursuers—and the reader—discover some truths about themselves and the nature of human existence. (p. 1)

But this makes a genuinely serious novel sound serious-minded, in an educational-television way; and far from being a high-minded, low-voltage debate on the rights and wrongs of Vietnam, "Going After Cacciato" is a fully dramatized account of men both in action and escaping from it….

Tim O'Brien's writing is crisp, authentic and grimly ironic…. As the characters are making their separate peace, their fare-well to arms, Hemingway rhythms emerge….

Perhaps all Americans writing about war must pay homage to Hemingway. But "Going After Cacciato" is unique in the way it counterpoints the gritty realism of combat against a dreamlike state in which "Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance."

Clearly we are dealing here with what the new South American novelists would call "magical realism." To combine the two and make the result esthetically convincing is a major achievement and possibly the only way to deal with the truths of Vietnam. (p. 21)