How to Tell a True War Story were events that the author, Tim O’Brien, expresses

throughout this chapter explaining the steps, or “ways”, on how to tell a very legitimate war story
backed up with examples of different types of perspectives on how a war story should be
structured or told upon by other people. O’Brien frequently uses repetition to pose the question
of “How to Tell a True War Story” over and over to refresh the reader’s mind and signal that
there are other ways to tell it and very effective ways in that matter.
One very prominent example/evidence that should pointed out that supports and
explains the author’s repeated repetition are the events O’Brien laid out. “A true war story is
never moral. It does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models or proper human
behavior. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.” (68) As said in the evidence, O’Brien, for this
explanation of a war story, expresses his thoughts on a war story and how every war story
SHOULD be in fact immoral. He explains his thoughts more briefly when he added “If a story
seems moral, do not believe it,” meaning that he really urges people who believes that war
stories that have this very euphoric feel in the ending, whether it’d be a very victorious one
where they won the war without any major casualties or it’d be a very despairing story
throughout the beginning and in the middle and when it gets closer to the end, the story
becomes a tranquil victory to display a type of hopefulness so that people can be encouraged or
even be uplifted when reading the war story that seems to be “moral”. All Tim O’Brien is trying to
say when conveying his message of true war stories are only immoral is that if you, the person
reading the book, is put into the position of a soldier in any war, you’ll see the casualties, the
significant changes of your other soldier buddies’ perception(s) of the war, the hardships,
struggles, even the difficulty and threat the war poses when you’re the one fighting in it, then
that makes a true war story.
Revealing the next iteration of his ongoing ideas of what a true war story is, O’Brien
divulges a time in the war where people started going a little crazy. “One guy sticks Juicy Fruit in
his ears. Another guy almost flips. Thing is, though, they can’t report music. They can’t get the
horn and call back to base and say, ‘Hey, listen, we need some firepower, we got to blow away
this weirdo gook rock band.’ They can’t do that. It wouldn’t go down.” (73) Pretty ‘disturbing’
details he added here. So with this excerpt, we are presented to some soldiers that were on the
lookout that seemed to be losing their minds when they started performing unusual acts like
putting a Juicy Fruit in the ears and even started hearing rock band music when it didn’t really
happen. This is a sign of the soldiers going crazy. The reason I believe they’re going crazy is
because of the war. It seems… well… crazy to think that a war can cause people to act like this
but it’s the truth, and that’s what O’Brien wants us to take away from this part of the chapter.
“But the guys don’t say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed,
and the whole war is right there in that stare.” (75) This part of the chapter explains to us that
the guys didn’t report back to the colonel about this incident because they weren’t sure if these
events that they had witnessed had happened or not. Before this excerpt that I presented
happened, the people had used over six trillion dollars on firepower towards where the two guys
were pointing (since they said there was this rock band that played). This is another sign that
people in the war really get messed up when it comes to their well-being because these soldiers
were scared and they started creating images in their head of what the war would be like since
they haven’t gotten disturbance for a long time, making them go crazy because they’re
overthinking the situation. This is another point O’Brien was trying to convey. The war changes
one’s well-being and self-control. These soldiers are just an example of what would happen in
the long run.
For the closure of this piece, we’ll look at the key points that were presented here that
O’Brien mentioned in his book. First, we have a part of the chapter where O’Brien expresses his
feelings about war stories always being immoral because of the hardships and struggles
soldiers had gone through to even survive in the war, making it a very hard story to tell since it's
very disturbing meaning. He also says that moral war stories are false because nothing, in a war
story perspective, really ends with a euphoric tone or victory - when it’s a victory, it’s a victory in
a sense of surviving. Lastly, he gives exclusive information on a story where two men started
hearing strange things when they were on the watchtower which led to many theories on what
actually happened. This shows that O’Brien is trying to convey soldiers becoming insane when
there is peace in the battleground.