Tim O’Brien, in “How to Tell a True War Story”, instructs his readers that truth is not actually factual and morals are not always absolute. By using a variety of story-telling techniques, and including the reader in a step-by-step approach to telling a story, O’Brien crafts an interwoven tale – part technique manual, part Vietnam War story – to get at the heart of “truth”. Rosemary King confirms that he attempts to “untangle the relationship between fact and fiction,” (par. 1). It’s within the “telling” of various stories, and the numerous revisions of fact, that the reader learns to experience a war story rather than connect the chronological dots of events. It is through embellishment, alteration, trimming, and out right lying that O’Brien forces one to experience the stories of war.

According to O’Brien, for a war story to feel true it sometimes needs to feel unbelievable and have an air of unreliability. This is made evident in Mitchell Sander’s tale of the six man patrol assigned to listen in the jungle for enemy movement. As the troops continue the mission for a week in seclusion, peculiar events begin to happen – they start hearing “this soft, kind of wacked-out music.” (O’Brien 1009). The sounds and volume increase, as if they were sinking underwater and the pressure was continually and constantly building. Sanders states the six man patrol starts to hear cocktail party sounds, the opera, choirs of children, and glee clubs. They are losing their minds and Sanders wants O’Brien “to feel the truth, to believe by the raw force of feeling.” (O’Brien 1009). The narrative builds slowly, swelling in intensity, allowing the reader to feel, in the deepest part of the body, the actual insanity these patrol soldiers may have been experiencing, although the “facts” of the story are fabricated. Sander’s admits to lying, but reassures that it really happened. Nick Hembree adds that as the author continues repeating the story “it comes a small step closer to a truth, becoming fuller with the telling, yet also becoming less believable.” (1046). This concept not only applies to Tim O’Brien, the author of the story, but to Mitchell Sanders as well, having heard this tale from someone, who heard it from someone, who heard it from another. The more the story continues down the path of telling, the more it inches closer to the absolute truth of the experience.

If you are to experience the truth of a story, you need to feel it, not just place it on a neat historical timeline. After the death of Curt Lemon, and the letter to Lemon’s sister never being responded to, Rat Kiley comes across a water buffalo. At first, his intentions seem altruistic, wanting to feed it some of his rations. When scoffed by the buffalo, Rat “stepped back and shot it through the right front knee.” (O’Brien 1012). He shoots off an ear, places two bullets in its flank, blows the mouth away, fires into its ribs, belly, butt, nose, and then he whispers something soft in its ear. The story we are lead to believe is that he wanted to help something that was helpless; when he couldn’t, he wanted to control its fate, as if trying to control the fate of his friend Curt Lemon. O’Brien, who tells this story to various groups of people, always seems to have someone “come up to [him] afterward and say she liked it.” (O’Brien 1015). The women made zero mention of the craziness of war, the death of friends, the fact that boys became men and jaded in the war – all they felt was compassion for the water buffalo, which is the underlying goal of O’Brien’s work. Every detail changes in the story, he tells the women from “beginning to end … it’s all made up.” (O’Brien 1015). Nick Hembree agrees that “telling the facts can be a poor way of getting people to understand,” (1046). O’Brien’s technique was for people to experience the brutality of war, to feel what the soldiers felt, to have compassion for the common place occurrence of another young man losing his life. O’Brien understood that Lemon’s death wouldn’t connect with the average person but, if told right, “adding and subtracting, making up a few things” (1015) would force us all to experience the true horrors of war without having any clichés or pithy truisms attached – a pure, primal connection.

By far the most important story in the text, the death of Curt Lemon shows the duality of factual occurrence and perception. O’Brien remembers the story clearly, as told to the reader in the text, but can’t seem to get it exactly right, shedding light on the duality of his mind. He knows that in “any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” (O’Brien 1008). The author focuses on the sunlight swallowing up his friend, and admits to having looked away, so as not to know the exact, factual truth. This does not bother him though, as it’s with his attempts of knowing what happened, and relating those facts to others, that he comes close to understanding the “authentic” truth. As the story unravels, notes Rosemary King, he “underscores the importance of manipulating what actually happened to get at the essence of truth.” (par. 4). The narrator O’Brien starts to realize, through the constant telling of Curt Lemon’s death, that a true war story will never end.

When fiction and truth collide, as it does in “How to Tell a True War Story”, the reader is offered a glimpse into what makes the truth authentic and how to utilize that concept to fully immerse oneself in truth. Tim O’Brien weaves a story with a variety of literary techniques, often leaving the reader slightly confused and having “gut” emotions to the text. One learns from the text that true war stories are “never moral” and if it seems so, “do not believe it.” (1007). One begins to understand that a true war story “makes the stomach believe” (1011) and that in most cases, if the story is true in O’Brien’s eyes, that it is never, ever about the war.

Hembree, Nick. "Dreams of Truth, Reality, and War." Literature and Ourselves: A Thematic Introduction for Readers and Writers. Eds. Gloria Mason Henderson Bill Day, and Sandra Stevenson Waller. 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.

King, Rosemary. “O’Brien’s HOW TO TELL A TRUE WAR STORY.” Explicator 57.3 (Spring 1999):7 pars. Literary ReferenceCenter. EBSCO. LansingCommunity College, Lansing, MI. 2 October 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com

O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." Literature and Ourselves: A Thematic Introduction for Readers and Writers. Eds. Gloria Mason Henderson Bill Day, and Sandra Stevenson Waller. 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.