As a fictional portrait of this war, "Going After Cacciato" is hard to fault, and will be hard to better…. (p. 130)

[An] entirely different kind of game is being played here from the deadly-true account of Vietnam military action, and the picaresque interludes, which take up about half the novel, serve not only as relief from Vietnam but as a kind of excuse from it. At another juncture, with a fine colorful flair that does not omit comedy and shrewd political irony, O'Brien involves his squad of heroes with the Savak—the Iranian security police—and a flamboyant escape and shoot-out and car chase climax the episode as rousingly as in a James Bond movie. Violence is everywhere, O'Brien may be saying; but the effect, when the narrative returns to Vietnam, is that a little Ian Fleming unreality has rubbed off on the real action, and the reader...