A Study Guide for Tim O’Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Tim O’Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671291

Book preview

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If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

Tim O'Brien

1973

Introduction

William Timothy (Tim) O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) was among the first American memoirs published about the Vietnam War. O'Brien, in fact, published some chapters in newspapers while he was still fighting in the country. He was morally opposed to the war, but he fought out of a deeply embedded sense of community and patriotism. His experiences, in which he saw his own officers and comrades routinely commit atrocities and war crimes, convinced him of the injustice of the war. After years of wrangling with his memoir and a potential career as a political scientist, O'Brien decided that becoming a writer was a way to devote his life to exposing the barbarity and irrationality of America's involvement in Vietnam, which he did in his memoir and in a series of award-winning novels all set during the Vietnam War.

Author Biography

O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota, on October 1, 1946, at the beginning of the post–World War II baby boom. His father, William, had fought in the Pacific, seeing action on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, while his mother, Ave, had been a WAVE (doing secretarial work for the US Navy). When he was ten, the family, including a younger brother and sister, moved to the small town of Worthington, Minnesota. His father sold insurance, and his mother worked as a grade school teacher.

At an early age, O'Brien found clippings of articles describing war experiences that his father had published in the New York Times during World War II, an event that put the idea of becoming a writer in his mind. O'Brien was not big or tough enough to go very far in high school sports, a central concern of the social life of the town. Rather than idyllic, O'Brien found small-town life boring and spent much of his time reading, including the most serious authors, such as the ancient philosopher Aristotle and the modern intellectual Erich Fromm. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in political science after being class president in his senior year.

Media Adaptations

Tantor Audio published an audiobook of If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home in 2012, narrated by Dan John Miller and with a running time of five hours and forty-six minutes.

His academic deferment over, O'Brien received his draft notice shortly after graduation and spent a year fighting in the Vietnam War. This would become the central event of his life and is the subject of his If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), a