The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The book, The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien shows us how a true war story should be told. This book follows a platoon of soldiers fighting in The Vietnam War and reveals the truth about war through their struggles. O’brien argues that “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. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb,

The director of the movie The Deerhunter, Michael Cimino, tells the story of three friends fighting in the vietnam war, Mike, Nick, and Steven. Cimino uses O’brien’s guidelines on how to tell a true war story in this movie, he accurately proves that a true war story is never moral, a true war story is unapologetically evil.
True war stories allow us to see the pure evil and lack of immediate remorse or hesitation in the soldiers at war. To have the ability to harm another human being and show no sign of remorse or hesitation is an example of unapologetic evil. The crimes committed against innocent civilians during a time of war, show how unapologetically evil some of the soldiers were. O’brien explains that the behavior of these soldiers show just how brutal war can be. True war stories do not “instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor

It takes a sick person to find joy in someone else’s suffering. This statement further proves O’brien’s claim that “you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” (O’brien, 76) Prisoners of war are often tortured, the torture that prisoners of war are forced to live through is obscene and murderous. One scene in the movie, The Deerhunter, demonstrates how purely evil soldiers at war can become. The men, Mike, Nick, and Steven were taken as prisoners of war. They were locked up in a lake area, under a building. In this scene we see vietcong soldiers forcing the prisoners to play russian roulette. One man stood in between the two soldiers and placed one bullet in the barrel. One by one they made each soldier play the game. When one died, another took his place. They would gamble on which soldier would be the first to die. They would stand there, excited to see which soldier would be the first to shoot themselves in the head, they later happily collected their money when they won the bet. By forcing the prisoners to play russian roulette, we saw the lack of remorse the soldiers had for the opposing side. We also saw the anger that one side had towards the other. The torture that Mike, Nick, and Steven, had to live through shows the evil in the hearts of the vietcong soldiers. The war desensitized them from death, they felt no remorse in playing this horrible game, they got