how to tell a true war story: week four
vrmain1986
Vernon Riggins
English 151 Wyman
How To Tell A True War Story
Telling a true war story is not as easy as one would think. Telling any story for that matter is just as
difficult. In telling war stories, one has to understand what the writer is really trying to tell the reader.
According to Tim O’Brien, it’s not a story about war, “it’s a love story”. In war, most people don’t
understand what is truly happening. Each soldier fighting for what they understand empirically, soon
begin to fight for who they understand intimately; the people around them. In any good war story ever
told, it’s not about the enemy that bombed the fox hole: It was about Jonny that never made it out of
the fox hole. It was about losing the only thing that made since in war.
“Love”, being such an illusive term, can be easily misconstrued in a story of war. What man truly
allows the word love to enter a heroic manly war story about Sal, ‘jumping off a cliff and landing in the
river basin bellow; as to throw the enemy off our trail’. Only the true hero’s of war admit love as being
the reason for what they did. Historically in United States, war is a man’s story; a man’s story with a
woman at home waiting to hear it. To incorporate love, or the idea of love, in to a story about the
connection between men, would be subject to interpretations far from the obvious interpretation;
people making meaning out of the senselessness.
I have read many of war stories in my anthropology class, stories about villages in Mozambique.
Stories to true to be real. Yet, the people that tell these stories, use creativity to explain the
unexplainable. Time slows down; villages are burned like coal; people are covered in blanks (insert
poetic image), life is recreated to explain what is to horrid to explain with words everyone can relate to.
even the writer.