payment page
"Hear that quiet, man?" he said. "That quiet–just listen. There’s your moral."
Mitchell Sanders enjoys telling strange, absurd war stories, and then following it up by saying that the moral of the story is that there is no more. Through Mitchell, Tim is able to hammer home the point that no experience he or his peers have in the war is one that teaches them a useful or profound lesson or brings them to an enlightened state of understanding. There is simply no way to make the horror of the Vietnam experience make any kind of logical sense.
He watched the young soldier wading through the water, bending down and then standing and then bending down again, as if something might finally be salvaged from all the waste.
The war in Vietnam is, for the men fighting it, a waste of time and a waste of life. Unlike WWII, which many people felt was a worthy cause to fight for, the reason behind the Vietnam War was murky and uninspiring. The trauma caused to both Americans and the Vietnamese, not to mention the massive death toll, seemed to happen for almost no discernible reason. The image of the young soldier – Tim O’Brien – wading through the water in search of his best friend’s corpse becomes a metaphor for every Vietnam soldier who fruitlessly searches for an explanation as to why they were forced into this horrible predicament.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.
The reality of war is that it lacks the glory, virtue, and heroism that is often added to war stories after the fact. War stories are an often-romanticized genre that make a case for the virtue of the American government or glorify the brave acts of individual soldiers. But for Tim O’Brien, these stories are not truthful. There are no lessons to be found in war. There is no virtue or romantic behavior to be found in war. Any story that tries to convince you otherwise is falsifying the experience for sentimental reasons, or worse, to propagandize. War is pointless and horrifying and exhausting, and war stories should reflect this.
