Numb

Throughout Going After Cacciato, I have noticed I sense of "nothingness" within the soldiers. It seems as though they feel numb to their surroundings. Why is this?

Mr. Crotty gave me his thoughts on the topic today in class while we were broken into groups. He gave me another sports analogy. He compared it to a volleyball game, but his point could be taken in any context. He told me to think about what it feels like to be locked into a game of volleyball: so focused on do what you have to do to win that you don't think about anyting else. Then he said to imagine that you had be in that mind set all day every day. It would be physically and emotionally draining.

Such is the case in the lives of soldiers and in particular the lives of a soldier in Vietnam. With the abundance of booby traps and guerilla warfare tactics, soldier had to be on edge and alert constantly. The difference between the sports analogy and Vietnam is that most of the time in Vietnam, as we see in Going After Cacciato, they hardly ever get a release of that tension.

There is one chapter that describes how at one point, everything followed a pattern; they knew when to be prepared and when to relax. then, however, came a lull in the action. To fill the void, the soldiers played basketball, but it merely achieved temporary distraction. The final release of this tension came when on of their own men got killed by a mine.

This topic made me think about the series Band of Brothers. I am sure many of you have seen it. At one point, a higher ranking officer tells a new recruit that he will not be an effective soldier until he accepts the fact he is already dead, because if he holds onto the hope of staying alive he will not be able to maintain composier under pressure.

In Going After Cacciato, it seems as though the men still have the hope of making it through the war and the tremendous stress on their psyches makes them unable to maintain composier. However, their panic is strictly mental. They express it through being supoerficially numb, but in reality, tremendously afraid.