“One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was/is Vietnam.”

—Minneapolis Star and Tribune

“Its effect is as devastating as if its author had been killed. But he survived. So, through such writing, may the American language.”

—Times (London)

“A genuine memoir in the full literary sense of that term, and a work that quickly established itself among Vietnam narratives as an exemplar of the genre.… It recalls the depictions of men at war by Whitman, Melville, Crane, and Hemingway; and it stands at the same time in the central tradition of American spiritual autobiography as well, the tradition of Edwards and Woolman, of Franklin and Thoreau and Henry Adams.”

—Philip D. Beidler, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam

“O’Brien writes with pain and passion on the nature of war and its effect on the men who fight in it. If I Die in a Combat Zone may, in fact, be the single greatest piece of work to come out of Vietnam, a work on a level with World War Two’s The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity!”

—Washington Star

“O’Brien brilliantly and quietly evokes the foot soldier’s daily life in the paddies and foxholes, evokes a blind, blundering war.… Tim O’Brien writes with the care and eloquence of someone for whom communication is still a vital possibility.… It is a beautiful, painful book, arousing pity and fear for the daily realities of a modern disaster.”

—Annie Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

“What especially distinguishes it is the intensity of its sketches from the infantry, an intensity seldom seen in journalistic accounts of the war.”

—Michael Casey, America

“An admirable book by an admirable man … a finely tuned, almost laconic account of soldiers at work.”

—Playboy

“A controlled, honest, well-written account … Mr. O’Brien is educated, intelligent, reflective, and thoroughly nice—all qualities that make his a convincing voice.”

—The New Yorker

“It’s a true writer’s job, gaining strength by dodging the rhetoric, and must be one of the few good things to come out of that desolating struggle.”

—Manchester Guardian

“O’Brien is writing of more than Vietnam.… What O’Brien is writing about is the military, and the feel of war, and cold fear, and madmen. O’Brien does it with a narrative that often is haunting, and as clean as the electric-red path of an M-16 round slicing through the Vietnam dark.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“A carefully made series of short takes, the honestly limited view of a serious, intelligent young man with a driving wish to be both just and brave. Its persistent tension is between contrary impulses: to fight well or to flee.”

—Geoffrey Wolff, Esquire

“It’s a beautiful book dealing with the unbeautiful subject of the Vietnam War.… O’Brien sees clearly and tells honestly. This may prove to be the foot soldier’s best personal account of America’s worst war.”

—Penthouse

“I wish Tim O’Brien did not write so beautifully, for he makes it impossible to forget his book. I have read it three times, and years from now it will still have that terrible power to make me remember and to make me weep.”

—Gloria Emerson