A True War Story

Elements of a true war story according to O’Brien:
“A true war story is never moral”
It has an “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil”
A true war story “embarrasses you”
In a true war story, “it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen”
“A true war story cannot be believed”
“You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end”
“True war stories do not generalize”
A true war story will tell the truth about beauty
“Often in a true war story there is not even a point”
“A true war story is never about war”
After O’Briens discussion of how to tell a true war story, I was truly surprised. This chapter caused me to realize that most of O’Brien’s novel is a piece of fiction. Also, it frustrated me since I was unable to tell the difference between fiction and fact in the novel. I now look at previous chapters with a skeptical eye, not sure if the stories are real or not. Many aspects of the novel will now seem less disturbing since there is a chance they never happened. Despite the element of fiction, O’Brien makes it clear that war stories are important. This is because he says that every true war story is actually about beauty, not wars. It causes one to admire the lives of the soldiers and his or her country during times of war. O’Brien goes as far as to call his story a love story. This is because he often describes scenarios where one man dies either next to or on behalf of another. The men’s reactions to the deaths generally reveal loving characteristics.
O’Brien discusses a couple stories about death in this chapter. One was about a man named Curt Lemon. Curt was tossing around a grenade an accidentally stepped onto a rigged bomb, O’Brien claims. The other story was about a baby water buffalo; it was shot many times yet stayed alive. Eventually, it was dumped off in the village well. To me, the story about the buffalo was more disturbing. A baby represents innocence; therefore, I cannot fathom a reason why this baby needed to die. Lemon, on the other hand, died due to a mistake and was not brutally tortured.