How to tell a true war story

A true war story is never moral.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you.

You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

In many cases, a true war story cannot be believed.

In other cases you cant even tell a true war story.

You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end.

In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth.

True war stories do not generalize.

A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

You could tell a true war story by the questions you ask.

Often in a true war story, there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end, you’ve forgotten the point again.

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war.

            Out of the war stories that were told by O’Brien in the “How to tell a true war story” chapter, I found the death of Curt Lemon to be more disturbing than killing the baby water buffalo. I don’t really know for sure why I feel this way. I guess it is because the Curt Lemon story was about a person’s death rather than an animal’s death. I’m not an animal rights activist, so I care more about the death of a person than an animal. It was extremely disturbing the way that the story was told. How they had to “Scrape” the body of Curt Lemon off the side of the tree. This creates images in my mind that are much more disturbing than the mutilation of a baby water buffalo.

            These stories are important because they allow the reader to feel what the character went through. Whether they believe it or not, they will at least think about it. They will be at that location, at that time, watching what is happening in real time. This is the meaning of a true war story.

            At the end, Tim O’Brien indicates to the reader that the book was in fact a love story rather than a war story. I think that this means that all of the stories that were told were concocted with the hopes of creating love. All of the stories told were linked to a relationship in one way or another. In addition to this, Tim tries to tell the story with the hopes of creating a love connection with the reader.