How To Tell A True War Story

One noticeable characteristic of Tim O'Brien's writing is the disconnected choppiness. O'Brien often jumps from the larger narrative to telling a specific story with little transition between the two. I think that this could possibly be an intentional choice on his part, but intentional or not, it relays the confusion and chaos that can be experienced during war, and likely have long term effects on soldiers even once out of the battle field. Another thing that I noticed is how O'Brien tells multiple versions of the story of the death of Curt Lemon. To me, this repetition is an example of how a person's mind after war just cannot quite make sense of what and how an event actually happened. O'Brien touches on this concept of being lost in the memory of an event when he says, "Often in a true war story… the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head"(78). Many PTSD patients consistently recall traumatic events and have trouble making any sense of what happened. O’Brien’s writing also contains many contradictions. While I think that this is another aspect that relates to the chaos of war, I also think it shows his struggle relay the vast spectrum of emotions felt during war. For example, O’Brien states, “You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not, Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference -- a powerful, implacable beauty...”(77). This makes sense to me in a way, because as O’Brien says, it is something you believe or understand in your stomach. When one considers the contradictions that O’Brien presents, you can almost sense what he’s saying in your gut. It is something hard to explain using analytical logic because it is more of a feeling, a gut instinct. I think that is also along the lines of what O’Brien means when he talks about the truth. He says, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth”(80). When I think about this statement it makes sense to me, my gut understands what O’Brien is saying, but when I try to explain it, I can’t. I think that’s because it’s something that, as O’Brien might put it, the gut can understand but the brain cannot. This feeling of disconnect between what you feel is correct and what you are able to prove is correct may be a sense of the internal disconnect caused by war.