If I Die In a Combat Zone, Box Me Up & Ship Me Home.

New York: Delacorte Press, 1973. First edition of O'Brien's first book. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by the author on the title page, "Peace Tim O'Brien." Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Wendell Minor. Photograph by Susan Futterman. An exceptional example. Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre. It received warm reviews from critics. Observed by the Washington Star as possibly "the single greatest piece of work to come out of Vietnam", with equally positive reviews from The Guardian, Gloria Emerson of the New York Times and was described as a personal account of "aching clarity... A beautiful, painful book," by the New York Times Book Review. Similar reviews were given from The Times, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times and Time Magazine who cited O'Brien as "Perhaps the best writer about Vietnam".