"It's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back"

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” That was something my best friend came up with after our fishing adventure ended with a sunburn and not a single fish. We meant it as a joke obviously, so we told people we caught everything imaginable- in a joking way because we’re both bad liars. Reading Tim O’Brien’s accounts, it reminded me of what my friend said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” When O’Brien talks about what’s too crazy to believe being the truth and what sounds normal being a fabrication to make the crazy parts seem believable. I was stunned to think that these men could fight in Vietnam, peel their friend off a tree, kill excessively using horrible weapons and chemicals. But they couldn’t muster the courage or the temerity to tell the unaltered truth to people who may not believe or understand- people who's opinion really doesn't matter. In a sense, that’s what PTSD is. Altering the truth, refusing to acknowledge it, or not knowing how to interpret and live with it.

Of course it’s more complicated than that, and the affects can be just like a time bomb, harmful and it goes off unexpectedly. O’Brien talks about a soldier waking up and shaking his wife saying, “I know what the point is!” Then telling her the entire story and forgetting the point at the end. That’s PTSD. In that case though- especially because it’s something soldiers struggle with even if they don’t have PTSD- the point the soldier is looking for isn’t the point to his story. I would speculate that it’s much more than that. He’s trying to justify what happened. What he did, what was done to him, what he saw, what he contributed to. And most of all, what was the point for the entire war. World War I was nicknamed “The War to End All Wars.” How wonderful would that have been... Eric Bogle wrote a song, “The Green Fields of France,” and he posed a horrifying question to someone who died in war or lost a loved one, he wrote:

And I can't help but wonder why

Do all those who lie here know why they died

Did you really believe them when they told you the cause

Did you really believe that this war would end wars

Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame

The killing and dying it was all done in vain

Oh Willy McBride it all happened again

And again, and again, and again, and again