O'Brien's "How to Write a True War Story"

     In this somber passage, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam veteran and author of the award winning novel The Things They Carried, shares his thoughts on writing a true war story. His unique writing style distinctly reflects the psychological effects brought on by combat. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, affects nearly 830,000 veterans. O’Brien’s passage parallels some of the symptoms displayed by soldiers suffering from the disorder.

     The most obvious connection between O’Brien’s passage and PTSD is his frequent use of repetition. He tells the story of the day he witnessed a friend of his, Curt Lemon, step on a rigged 105 round and have his body blown into a nearby tree, killing him. O’Brien goes back to this story multiple times throughout the passage, each time mentioning many of the same small details as well as adding on more with each retelling. One of the most common symptoms of PTSD is recurring memories or flashbacks to traumatic events. Such horrible events tend to etch themselves in the mind, though many happen so quickly that it is often difficult for the person undergoing the experience to be able to recall important aspects of the trauma, even though he or she may have frequent flashbacks to it. This inability to recall the entire situation can be interpreted as another symptom of PTSD. O’Brien summarizes this phenomena when he writes, "In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way."

     War, O‘Brien says, is full of contradictions. "War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead." O’Brien certainly uses contradiction in his writing, frequently changing ideas about what a real war story means. These contradictions of combat run alongside the contradiction of morals that come with war – the blurring of what is right and what is wrong. "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing much is ever very true." In this loss of the sense of truth, soldiers often come to wonder what the point of war is. O’Brien mentions the struggle soldiers often face in this search for a point, using the image of a soldier reaching an epiphany, waking his wife up to tell her the story, getting to the end, and forgetting what the point was. Avoidance is another common symptom of PTSD. Soldiers puzzle over the point of war stories in hopes of finding out what the true purpose is, why such things had to happen, if only to avoid the chilling, terrible suggestion that maybe, just maybe, there is no point at all.