How to Tell A True War Story

1. OBrien believes that a war story should never be moral. Virtue

and proper human behavior have no place in a story about war,
because the trademark of a war story is its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. OBrien
believes that if someone reads a war story and leaves feeling
uplifted or filled with some sense of goodness within all the bad,
they have fallen for the lie created to encourage and protect the
act of war. He believes they are hard to believe because the
aspects of the story that seem crazy are fact and the normal
isnt. But when its believable, it should conjure a gut feeling and
the stomach has to feel it.
2. According to OBrien, absolute occurrence is irrelevant. Fictional
truth and historical truth coincide, with both present for a true
war story to occur. There are bits of both within a war story,
drawing from real history and personal perspective. Taking his
example from page 83, he first writes out a story about four guys
going down a trail and when a grenade sails out to them one of
them jumps on it and the rest are saved. Then the writes out a
story in which there are still four guys walking about a trail and
the grenade that sails out is a killer grenade and it doesnt
matter that one guy takes the blast because all of them die
anyways. The dead men speak in this story with a jocular tone.
The first might have truly happened in history, but war stories do
not rely on historical truth. The second would be a truer war
story than the first in OBriens terms because it was how it
seemed to the soldiers at the time. Their personal perspectives
are the truths that comprise war stories, not historical fact. I had
never thought of it this way, but I definitely agree.
3. Stories are important because they invoke an emotional
response and personal as well as cultural & societal reflection.
OBrien believes experiences such as love, sorrow,
disappointment, and frustration are important to remind people
what war is truly like, and stories are the best way to deliver
them. Reading and telling stories allows for introspection from
the teller and the gaining of a new perspective for the listener.
People need to contemplate the world around them and the
events occurring, and what better way for them to do that then
by listening to an emotionally resonating story?
4. The baby water buffalo scene is more disturbing than the death
of Dave Jensen because of the juxtaposition of the two. OBrien
repeats over and over again baby when talking about the
water buffalo, forcing you to connect the death of the buffalo
with the death of an innocent baby. Humans have an innate
connection towards babies because they are so innocent; they
can do nothing bad. This poor baby water buffalo was tortured,

shot in the knees and stomach and nose over and over again and
reading it made you think Rat Kiley is scum. Compare the slow
death of an innocent baby to the death of a war weary soldier,
already dirty with the deaths of other men on his hands. His
death would be relatively quick, and he knows it could happen at
any moment.