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How Does O Brien Tell A True War Story

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The story of the shit field keeps on being told, O'Brien does not stop talking about it in the book. O'Brien says that if a story keeps on coming back, it might show that it is a true war story, "You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end," (72). PTSD, the effects of the story do not lessen. So it's always replaying in the mind. Like the person would never forget that one story, because he knows that it was his fault and it haunts him. O'Brien keeps on talking about this field for four chapters, then he stops after going to the field with his daughter, "Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. In a way, maybe, I'd gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I'd mostly worked my way out," (178). In the fourth …show more content…

O'Brien uses a lot of offensive words in this story of Kiowa dying in the field, "As first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil," (65-66). The evil in the story is the enemy soldiers or the opposite side that you are fighting. While obscenity is the curse words, which the soldiers use in the story. But it is also the author who uses these words to describe a place or person in the story. As well evil is in most war stories, because there is always a point in the story where your friend got killed by enemy soldiers or if one of the soldiers was going against his friend. When the soldiers were looking for Kiowa's in the field, Norman was trying to be funny, "Man, talk about irony. I bet if Kiowa was here, I bet he'd just laugh. Eating shit--it's your classic irony," (158). Their best friend just died from mortar fire, which caused him to sink into the field made of human waste. Which VC is the evil soldiers and after the battle, the soldiers are making jokes and saying curse words. The reason for this, is that they just got through a hellish night with not a lot of sleep and now they are looking for their best buddy who drowned in Vietnam waste disposal field. While there is obscenity and evil in the story, it is still hard to figure out the truth and the lie in the

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In this chapter, narrator O 'Brien talks about how the men in the platoon were looking for Kiowa 's body after the rain had partially ceased. We find three different perspectives in the chapter: Lieutenant Jimmy Cross 's, the young soldier 's, and the rest of the men in the platoon. This quote belongs to Jimmy 's perspective. In it, we readers sense his feeling of guilt for loosing one of the men of his Company because he feels that Kiowa 's death was his mistake due to his lack of intuition that something bad could happen near the shit field and his lack of courage for refuting the higher

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Overall Kiowa was known for being a kind troop, a man with his beliefs straight, and a well respected human being. Kiowa indirectly sets himself up as a very well rounded, gentleman numerous times in this book by what he says and thinks. For example, While everyone else harassed the inexperienced soldier Tim O’Brien for not shaking the dead Vietnamese man’s hand, Kiowa consoled him by saying, “‘You did a good thing today... That shaking hands crap, it isn’t decent.’” (215).

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This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him. This chapter also contain a lot of psychological lens. From the way Tim O’Brien felt when he was shot and separated from his unit to a new unit to when he wanted revenge on Bobby Jorgenson for almost “killing” him.

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Rat Kiley weeps after these events unfold. After witnessing this O’Brien describes war as “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.”

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And so late in the night, when they took mortar fire from across the river, all they could do was snake down the slop and lie there and wait. The field just exploded. Rain and slip and shrapnel, it all mixed together, and the field seemed to boil. He would explain this to Kiowa’s father. Carefully, not covering up his own guilt… My own fault, he would say.”

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Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are". (O'Brien 38) O’Brien uses his stories to reach his audience. There are generations of people who have no clue what war is really like, whether it is because of our misconceptions based on what media portrays or the fact that there are people who have not served in the military. Some people might know about Vietnam and know the outcome of the war, but they don’t have the experience and real life understanding of how that story ended. They might not be able to fully understand the feelings of a soldier.

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Norman is having issues with his life after the war, he cannot find anyone to vent his inner emotions over feeling responsible for Kiowa’s death. Back home, he doesn’t have anyone to tell stories to because he knows they wouldn’t truly accept what he has to say, considering most of his stories are immoral, and they’re not easily relatable and understood. This demonstrates how Norman is feeling isolated, and how he’s struggling to be able to cope in his own way because he doesn’t have someone to talk to. As a result, in hopes of relief, he contacts O’Brien and writes “a long, disjointed letter in which [he] described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after war” (O’Brien 149). Norman craves the idea of togetherness, by his repetition of wanting someone to be there, to simply listen to his stories and understand what he’s feeling, allowing him to finally escape his grief. Later, he claims, “ ‘...it is almost like I got killed over in Nam… That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him…’ ”

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O’Brien goes into great depth in this small quote on how loss of innocence and war can affect people in the war. The quote “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t” shows how war is so different from what any human experiences at home. After that small quote he follows it up by bringing up how you have to use normal stuff to show how crazy these things are and how much of a pole it can have on somebody during a war. The way that war is treated for many is mostly the mental part that is struggling. But for many "War is hell, but that's not 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.

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O’Briens intended audience is people who have an interest in war, and uses mortality and death, along with morality to help the audience get a deeper understanding of what could possibly occur at war. First, O’Brien discusses how mortality and death greatly affected many of the men around him. In the chapter ” In the Field” Kiowa is gone and there is nothing they could do to save him. The

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Because of the traumatic and uncivilized nature of the war, the soldiers who were emerged in the war underwent significant changes and faced difficulties adjusting back to normal life. The style which O’Brien writes his stories emphasizes the stark contrast between the two worlds. In “Notes” O’Brien describes the original version of “Speaking of Courage,” claiming that “I managed to erase the story’s flaws from my memory, taking pride in the shadowy, idealized recollection of its virtues” (O’Brien 153). He modifies the events in order to make the stories readable for the general public, and in doing so he creates these stories somewhere in between the realities of the war and what the public wants to visualize. The deeply disturbing events portrayed throughout the novel provide a glimpse into the dark areas of war not seen by society.

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Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

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Again, rather than describing the war atrocities firsthand, the narrator deliberately avoids retrieving those traumatic events from his memory and, presumably just to stay sane, relies on other people’s

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Why Is Telling A True War Story Hard Lots of stories are hard to comprehend because they’re more brutal and traumatic for listeners, even the story-teller. In three stories: “The Man I Killed”, “How To Tell A True War Story”, and “Speaking of Courage”, Tim O’Brien showed how changing certain parts of a story and making them graceful, can make them easier to comprehend. However sometimes telling the story the way it was makes it brutal and gruesome, though some listeners prefer that over gracefulness.

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The knowledge of ethos, logos, and pathos develops and improves yourself as an analytical reader by recognizing the appeals the author uses throughout their text for the readers. It helps reveal the author’s approach in their writing, such as appealing to the reader’s emotions, setting themselves as an credible and reliable source, or uses facts and data to back up their approach. It develops a deeper understanding of the text and the author’s way of addressing the audience. The things they carry are both physical and emotional burdens that weigh them down. O’Brien repeats the weight of each physical item they carry: “for a total weight of nearly 18 pounds...the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds...starlight scope, which weighed 6.3 pounds…” (page

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