Going after CacciatobyTim O'Brien

Going After Cacciato (1978) is Tim O'Brien's second novel and it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979. The book is told from perspective of a squad member Paul Berlin to find a fellow soldier, Cacciato, who went AWOL by deciding to walk from Vietnam to Paris for a peace talk. The book is a tale of psychological trauma. The plot takes many hallucinatory twist as the squad goes through collection of events that are comical theatre of absurd while never escaping the atrocious brutality of the war. The book finds way to be funny despite the unquestionably dark undertone.  It is widely considered to be one of the finest novels written about the Vietnam War.