Summary
O'Brien prefaces this story by saying that it is true.
A week after his friend is killed, Rat Kiley writes a letter to
the friend's sister, explaining what a hero her brother was and
how much he loved him. Two months pass, and the sister never writes
back. Kiley, frustrated, spits and calls the sister a “dumb cooze.”
O'Brien insists that a true war story is not moral and tells us
not to believe a story that seems moral. He uses Kiley's actions
as an example of the amorality of war stories. O'Brien reveals that
Kiley's friend's name was Curt Lemon and that he died while playfully
tossing a smoke grenade with Rat Kiley, in the shade of some trees.
Lemon stepped into the sunlight and onto a rigged mortar round.
O'Brien says sometimes a true war story cannot be believed because
some of the most unbearable parts are true, while some of the normal
parts are not. Sometimes, he says, a true war story is impossible
to tell. He describes a story that Mitchell Sanders tells. Sanders
recounts the experience of a troop that goes into the mountains
on a listening post operation. He says that after a few days, the men
hear strange echoes and music—chimes and xylophones—and become frightened.
One night, the men hear voices and noises that sound like a cocktail
party. After a while they hear singing and chanting, as well as
talking monkeys and trees. They order air strikes and they burn
and shoot down everything they can find. Still, in the morning,
they hear the noises. So they pack up their gear and head down the
mountain, where their colonel asks them what they heard. They have
no answer.
The day after he tells this story, Mitchell approaches
O'Brien and confesses that some parts were invented. O'Brien asks
him what the moral of the story is and, listening to the quiet,
Sanders says the quiet is the moral. O'Brien says the moral of a
true war story, like the thread that makes a cloth, cannot be separated
from the story itself. A true war story cannot be made general or
abstract, he says. The significance of the story is whether or not
you believe it in your stomach. Heeding his own advice, he relays
the story of Curt Lemon's death in a few, brief vignettes. He explains
that the platoon crossed a muddy river and on the third day Lemon
was killed and Kiley lost his best friend. Later that day, higher
in the mountains, Kiley shot a Viet Cong water buffalo repeatedly—though
the animal was destroyed and bleeding, it remained alive. Finally
Kiowa and Sanders picked up the buffalo and dumped it in the village
well.
O'Brien expounds on his problem by making a generalization. He
says that though war is hell, it is also many other contradictory things.
He explains the mysterious feeling of being alive that follows a
firefight. He agrees with Sanders's story of the men who hear things
in the jungle—war is ambiguous, he says. For this reason, in a true
war story, nothing is absolutely true. O'Brien remembers how Lemon
died. Lemon was smiling and talking to Kiley one second and was
blown into a tree the next. Jensen and O'Brien were ordered to climb
the tree to retrieve Lemon's body, and Jensen sang “Lemon Tree”
as they threw down the body parts.
A true war story can be identified by the questions one
asks afterward, O'Brien says. He says that in the story of a man
who jumps on a grenade to save his three friends, the truth of the
man's purpose makes a difference. He says that sometimes the truest
war stories never happened and tells a story of the same four men—one
jumps on a grenade to take the blast, and all four die anyway. Before
they die, though, one of the dead turns to the man who jumped on
the grenade and asks him why he jumped. The already-dead jumper says,
“Story of my life, man.”
Thinking of Curt Lemon, O'Brien concludes he must have thought
the sunlight was killing him. O'Brien wishes he could get the story
right—the way the sunlight seemed to gather Lemon and carry him
up in the air—so that we could believe what Lemon must have seen
as his final truth.
O'Brien says that when he tells this story, a woman invariably approaches
him and tells him that she liked it but it made her sad, and that
O'Brien should find new stories to tell. O'Brien wishes he could
tell the woman that the story he told wasn't a war story but a love
story. He concludes that all he can do is continue telling it, making
up more things in order give greater truth to the story.
Analysis
“How to Tell a True War Story” examines the complex relationship between
the war experience and storytelling. It is told half from O'Brien's
role as a soldier, as a reprise of several old Vietnam stories, and
half from his role as a storyteller, as a discourse on the art of
storytelling. O'Brien's narrative shows that a storyteller has the
power to shape his or her listeners' experiences and opinions. Much
in the same way that the war distorts the soldier's perceptions
of right and wrong, O'Brien's story distorts our perceptions of
beauty and ugliness. O'Brien tells Curt Lemon's death as a love
story. Despite its gruesomeness, evident by O'Brien's graphic recounting
of the situation, he describes the scene as beautiful, focusing
on the sunlight rather than the carnage. Blood and carnage are never
even discussed, not even as O'Brien and Dave Jensen are forced to
shimmy up the tree in order to throw down Curt Lemon's body parts.
The way O'Brien describes this action, and the death in general,
is unspecific and detached. His storytelling functions as a salve
that allows him to deal with the complexity of the war experience,
so much even as to turn the story of Curt Lemon from a war story
to a love story.
A true war story, O'Brien explains, has an absolute allegiance
to obscenity and evil that renders commonly held storytelling notions of
courage and pride obsolete. When we learn that Rat Kiley sends a
letter to Curt Lemon's sister, extolling the virtues of his fellow
soldier after his death, we expect the death and the story to have
a positive, heartwarming outcome. The essence of the true war story
lies in the reality of the situation: the sister does not respond,
and Kiley reacts immaturely. This irony makes sense, O'Brien contends,
both because Kiley is young and because he has been exposed to such unspeakable
things. He calls the sister a “dumb cooze” not because he is a misogynist
but because it is his way of negotiating anger. Blame must be assigned,
Kiley rationalizes in his anger, and O'Brien sees the truth in Kiley's
emotions. A true war story is not about courage and heroism but
about the reality of misplaced anger and the inability of soldiers
to deal effectively with their feelings about a horrible experience.
Although all members of the Alpha Company are effectively
soldiers turned storytellers, O'Brien and Sanders take their role
as storytellers more seriously than the rest. Ironically, Sanders's
most vehement piece of advice—to get out of the way and to let the
story tell itself—is one that both he and O'Brien ignore. When he
inserts himself into his story about the soldiers who hear voices,
Sanders gets in the way, with his comments and clarifications, where
he might have let the image of the men speak for itself. This contradiction
proves that there are no truths to storytelling, even and especially
in true war stories.
Sanders's advice points out that even in the case of an
unreliable narrator, the truest part of a true war story is the
listener's visceral reaction to the details. O'Brien insists the
story is absolutely true, but then, after telling it, in a more
general discussion of storytelling, insists that it's difficult
to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. The only conclusion
we can arrive at is that truth in a true war story is irrelevant.
O'Brien is so explicit as to say “war is hell,” but that simple
statement has little impact because it is so general and clichéd.
Truth is what “makes the stomach believe,” like the image of Rat
Kiley torturing a buffalo because he cannot sit with his emotions
about Curt Lemon's death. The image of this suffering Viet Cong
buffalo that refuses to die is a far more vivid testament to war
than a hollow cry of “war is hell.”
