I have never thought too much about war stories and whether they are true or false. Now that I have read “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien I believe that the truest war stories, are the ones with no moral value and no happy ending. Now looking back, a lot of the war stories I have heard about are tragedies that happened for no good reason; mostly goofing off and accidents. Any whenever I hear about a war tragedy on the news they usually don’t go into detail about how it happened and why. Everything is candy coated or made to sound like it happened for a greater good, which is not always the case. Tim O’Brien writes “If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie” (O’Brien: Pg. 65). That pretty much believes that you should not believe the candy coated stories we hear on the news or read in the newspaper, because they are probably much worst or maybe even a complete different story altogether. Tim O’Brien also writes “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggests models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (Tim O’Brien: Pg. 65). I feel that O’Brien is basically saying that the more rude and crude the story is, or the more morally unjust it may seem, probably, the truer it is. Which for me, the more I read this story the harder it was for me to grasp. It was kind of depressing for me because I began to feel like war is pointless and has no moral value what so ever, which goes against everything I believe and hope for. This story really got me questioning myself; my beliefs and how I feel about war. I always have so much to say about things, but when I read these stories they just left me speechless. Kind of like Tim O’Brien writes “In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “oh” (O’Brien: Pg. 74). That just about sums up the whole story. If you are not left speechless, then it is probably not a true war story.
Works Cited
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carries. True. Oct. 1987.
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