Bob Kiley was a boy who went off to war and did not come back. He became Rat Kiley, a man who would shoot through his own foot to escape the war (223). “They were kids; they just didn’t know. A nature hike, they thought, not even a war…” (69) Only nineteen years old, and Kiley loses his best friend to a rigged 105 round. Before that point, he and Curt Lemon saw it as an adventure, playing around with smoke grenades, laughing, telling jokes. Then Lemon dies, out of nowhere, and Kiley is forced to face the facts of war. His innocence is gone, and he sees right through to the bloody heart of it.
Kiley’s tendency to liven up the truth is in every one of us. He has a "compulsion to rev up the facts" (89); he is every teenage boy, boasting about what he had done on the weekend, using bravado to make up for his own insecurities. In “How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien plays on this facet of his character, bringing Kiley’s love, rage, and grief to life with his description of what happened to the water buffalo. (78) In the end, it does not matter if it actually happened. It is a truer story than most. …show more content…
But two months on, he has received no reply, and he cannot find closure; he looks at O’Brien with “big sad gentle killer eyes” and calls her a “cooze” (69) for not writing back. On some level, he feels relief for surviving, and guilty for feeling relieved. He wants Lemon’s sister to exonerate him, to tell him that it was not his fault that Curt Lemon died. But she never writes back, and his guilt goes unresolved. So he calls her a “cooze”, channeling his frustration into macho
Kiley’s tendency to liven up the truth is in every one of us. He has a "compulsion to rev up the facts" (89); he is every teenage boy, boasting about what he had done on the weekend, using bravado to make up for his own insecurities. In “How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien plays on this facet of his character, bringing Kiley’s love, rage, and grief to life with his description of what happened to the water buffalo. (78) In the end, it does not matter if it actually happened. It is a truer story than most. …show more content…
But two months on, he has received no reply, and he cannot find closure; he looks at O’Brien with “big sad gentle killer eyes” and calls her a “cooze” (69) for not writing back. On some level, he feels relief for surviving, and guilty for feeling relieved. He wants Lemon’s sister to exonerate him, to tell him that it was not his fault that Curt Lemon died. But she never writes back, and his guilt goes unresolved. So he calls her a “cooze”, channeling his frustration into macho