According to Garp and the posthumous collection The Stories of John Cheever . Even more amazing was that a novel with the simple power and resonance of Cacciato had gone virtually unnoticed up to that point. The book chronicles a squad of Vietnam foot soldiers in pursuit of a deserter, the clueless Cacciato, who on a whim decides to pick up and hike to Paris on foot. In 400 pages of unadorned prose that melds Ernest Hemingway with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, O'Brien manages to capture all the insanity, mysticism, confusion, and surreality that was the Vietnam experience. It hurts to be shot.
Dead men are heavy.
Don't seek trouble, it'll find you soon enough. What remained was simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any other war. No new messages.