Telling A True War Story Analysis

Why Is Telling A True War Story Hard

Lots of stories are hard to comprehend because they’re more brutal and traumatic for listeners, even the story-teller. In three stories: “The Man I Killed”, “How To Tell A True War Story”, and “Speaking of Courage”, Tim O’Brien showed how changing certain parts of a story and making them graceful, can make them easier to comprehend. However sometimes telling the story the way it was makes it brutal and gruesome, though some listeners prefer that over gracefulness. Telling a true war story can be hard to do, because soldiers are tempted to change some traumatic aspects to make the story easier to comprehend, and not so traumatic for the listener.

For the readers who prefer the brutal and gruesome stories,

For example when Curt Lemon died, he has a gentle version. “I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree,”(How To Tell A True War Story, 52). O’Brien tells a graceful version of a gruesome story. Many people prefer thinking of Lemon being killed by sunlight. That version is much more graceful than the truth, “In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trap 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ and we threw down the parts.”(How To Tell A True War Story, 51). The true version is always what hits the hardest.

In “The Things They Carried”