Soldiers Home
Essay Preview: Soldiers Home
Report this essay
“How to Tell a True War Story”
Summary
OBrien prefaces this story by saying that it is true. A week after his friend is killed, Rat Kiley writes a letter to the friends sister, explaining what a hero her brother was and how much he loved him. Two months pass, and the sister never writes back. Kiley, frustrated, spits and calls the sister a “dumb cooze.” OBrien insists that a true war story is not moral and tells us not to believe a story that seems moral. He uses Kileys actions as an example of the amorality of war stories. OBrien reveals that Kileys friends name was Curt Lemon and that he died while playfully tossing a smoke grenade with Rat Kiley, in the shade of some trees. Lemon stepped into the sunlight and onto a rigged mortar round.
OBrien says sometimes a true war story cannot be believed because some of the most unbearable parts are true, while some of the normal parts are not. Sometimes, he says, a true war story is impossible to tell. He describes a story that Mitchell Sanders tells. Sanders recounts the experience of a troop that goes into the mountains on a listening post operation. He says that after a few days, the men hear strange echoes and music–chimes and xylophones–and become frightened. One night, the men hear voices and noises that sound like a cocktail party. After a while they hear singing and chanting, as well as talking monkeys and trees. They order air strikes and they burn and shoot down everything they can find. Still, in the morning, they hear the noises. So they pack up their gear and head down the mountain, where their colonel asks them what they heard. They have no answer.
The day after he tells this story, Mitchell approaches OBrien and confesses that some parts were invented. OBrien asks him what the moral of the story is and, listening to the quiet, Sanders says the quiet is the moral. OBrien says the moral of a true war story, like the thread that makes a cloth, cannot be separated from the story itself. A true war story cannot be made general or abstract, he says. The significance of the story is whether or not you believe it in your stomach. Heeding his own advice, he relays the story of Curt Lemons death in a few, brief vignettes. He explains that the platoon crossed a muddy river and on the third day Lemon was killed and Kiley lost his best friend. Later that day, higher in the mountains, Kiley shot a Viet Cong water buffalo repeatedly–though the animal was destroyed and bleeding, it remained alive. Finally Kiowa and Sanders picked up the buffalo and dumped it in the village well.
OBrien expounds on his problem by making a generalization. He says that though war is hell, it is also many other contradictory things. He explains the mysterious feeling of being alive that follows a firefight. He agrees with Sanderss story of the men who hear things in the jungle–war is ambiguous, he says. For this reason, in a true war story, nothing is absolutely true. OBrien remembers how Lemon died. Lemon was smiling and talking to Kiley one second and was blown into a tree the next. Jensen and OBrien were ordered to climb the tree to retrieve Lemons body, and Jensen sang “Lemon Tree” as they threw down the body parts.
A true war story can be identified by the questions one asks afterward, OBrien says. He says that in the story of a man who jumps on a grenade to save his three friends, the truth of the mans purpose makes a difference. He says that sometimes the truest war stories never happened and tells a story of the same four men–one jumps on a grenade to take the blast, and all four die anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead turns to the man who jumped on the grenade and asks him why he jumped. The already-dead jumper says, “Story of my life, man.”
Thinking of Curt Lemon, OBrien concludes he must have thought the sunlight was killing him. OBrien wishes he could get the story right–the way the sunlight seemed to gather Lemon and carry him up in the air–so that we could believe what Lemon must have seen as his final truth.
OBrien says that when he tells this story, a woman invariably approaches him and tells him that she liked it but it made her sad, and that OBrien should find new stories to tell. OBrien wishes he could tell the woman that the story he told wasnt a war story but a love story. He concludes that all he can do is continue telling it, making up more things in order give greater truth to the story.
Analysis
“How to Tell a True War Story” examines the complex relationship between the war experience and storytelling. It is told half from OBriens role as a soldier, as a reprise of several old Vietnam stories, and half from his role as a storyteller, as a discourse on the art of storytelling. OBriens narrative shows that a storyteller has the power to shape his or her listeners experiences and opinions. Much in the same way that the war