O'Brien's "If I Die In A Combat Zone", Hasford's "The Short-Timers", Moore's "The Green Berets", And O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato": Parallels

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all this: I had neither the expertise nor
the wisdom to synthesize answers..." (Combat, 29), the character simply is
paralyzed by fear, and because of this, gets on the draftee bus without
really having made a decision.

It was an intellectual and physical stand-off, and I did not have the
energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even a
observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance
between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It
was not that I valued that order. But I feared its opposite, inevitable
chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in
my life, the end of it all (Combat, 34).

This quote best illustrates his inability to make that necessary decision,
and his failure to overcome his debilitating fear.
In Hasford's The Short Timers, fear is an underlying current to
much of the segment that we have read. From when the poges say, "Fucking
grunts...they're nothing but ...

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