The Power of Fear in Obrien's If I die in "A Combat Zone", Hasford's The "Short-Timers", Moore's "The Green Berets", and Obrien's "Going After Cacciato"

The introductory readings, Obrien's If I die in a Combat Zone, Hasford's The Short-Timers, Moore's The Green Berets, and Obrien's Going After Cacciato, all share a common element - fear. An integral part of each story is a sense of fear that helps to intensify the experiences being related by the author; ie make the stories more realistic. Without the use of fear, these stories would lose much of their impact. The entire experience of …

…is interesting because the authors use it in so many different ways - but it remains one of the common denominators to all of them. How the characters deal with the fear, and in what context it is described in is a large part of the Vietnam story as a whole, and many of the issues that Vietnam is famous for build almost solely upon the constant fear that pervaded the lives of those there.