The Things They Carried: How to Tell a True War Story

Question: Often, in the course of his stories O’Brien tells the reader beforehand whether or not the story will have a happy ending. Why might he do this? According to the author, how do you tell a true war story?

Answer:

            When O’Brien tells a story, he often says whether or not it will have a happy ending beforehand. This is because a lot of the time the story is not about the ending. It’s about the middle, the course of actions that take place to get there. More often than not, telling the end doesn’t ruin the story. It just sparks more interest for the reader because they’re curious as to how the story has gotten to the place to allow that ending to occur. Also it helps the reader to view things that the author means them to be viewed from the beginning. Occasionally the reader will think that something is good when the author means it to be bad. For example, in the chapter “On the Rainy River”, I thought that Tim joining the army and not running away was a sign of courage when the author meant it as a sign of cowardice and a cause for embarrassment. If he had not made that clear within the beginning by saying “This is one story I’ve never told before… To go into it, I’ve always thought, would only cause embarrassment…” (O’Brien, 39), I would have never known that it was something he was ashamed of.

            According to O’Brien, there are a lot of elements to telling a true war story. One important factor is that it must never have a moral to it and the point of the story, if there is one, isn’t something that is ever really comprehended. If the war story does have a moral, it’s most likely not true. However, if it manages to be both true and have a moral, then the moral is buried very deeply inside it. Due to the witness’s perspective of the events being more surreal than the actual events, it’s likely that the story will seem fake, which just proves that it’s real. True war stories don’t really have an ending and can go on forever. Finally, to tell a true war story, the story isn’t really to be about war. It’s about the things that happened during the war that contradicted the war, the things that stood out because they weren’t really about war at all.