Tell A True War Story Analysis

Telling a true war story is very hard, most of the time people can't actually recall every detail of their time in the war. In Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, he goes over what it was like to fight on the front lines overseas in the Vietnam War. The physical and emotional stress and tension of being there, witnessing horrifically dramatic scenes made it very hard to physically remember what had happened there.

Telling a war story is an art, you have to paint the images into the reader's head, each stroke an idea, a memory, until you can create a masterpiece. Sometimes fiction is “truer than true”. This means that when writing a fiction story or novel, that sometimes they can be more real than the real story. Embellishing, twisting …show more content…
It is about telling a story that you can actually let yourself believe, letting you recall the “truth”. Story telling and inventing your stories were very difficult for many of the men and women coming back from the Vietnam war. In O’Brien’s case, the events, the characters are just invented. This was what soldiers did, the things that they saw were so graphic and unexplainable that they mentally can't remember those …show more content…
He writes to his friend's sister and when no response is given, he becomes frustrated. Due to this frustration he calls her a "dumb cooze." Following this, O'Brien argues that this is a true war story because it is not moral,and never to believe a war story if it seems moral. The man that was killed was Curt Lemon. He was killed in what seemed as slow motion. He stepped into the sunlight, his face was shining, the sun was bright upon him. O'Brien states that it is often difficult to "separate what happened from what seemed to happen." For this reason the craziness of war stories are true, yet the normal things are false. This is because the normal things allow a person to believe the crazier parts of a