How to Tell a True War Story (Criticism)

Criticism

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Andrews Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, where she teaches literature and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in literature, and regularly writes book reviews, historical articles, and literary criticism for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, Andrews Henningfeld uses deconstructive literary criticism to examine the ways in which Tim O’Brien simultaneously searches for truth and undermines that quest in his story.

Tim O’Brien was already a successful writer by the time he penned “How to Tell a True War Story” in 1987. In particular, critics had praised his previous novel, Going After Cacciato, for which O’Brien won a National Book Award. This novel opens many of the themes that O’Brien would later explore in The Things They Carried, and particularly in “How to Tell a True War Story.” O’Brien frequently returns to the same themes again and again: truth, imagination, memory, and stories. As many critics have suggested, O’Brien’s work is more about the quest for truth, the use of the imagination in telling the truth, and the art of storytelling in creating the truth than it is about the Vietnam War.

In an important article, Catherine Calloway examines the themes of truth, imagination, etc., focusing on metafiction in The Things They Carried. Calloway writes,

Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.

While this definition may seem at first complicated, at closer examination the concepts are not difficult. First, Calloway simply argues that metafictional stories take as their subject the creation of fiction. That is, these are stories about the creation of stories. Clearly, “How to Tell a True War Story” is a metafictional story. O’Brien immediately begins to write about the creation of stories after he tells the story of Rat writing to Curt Lemon’s sister: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.” The rest of the story is peppered with instructions to the would-be writer and would-be reader of war stories.

Further, metafictional stories do not let the reader forget that the story the reader is reading is a story, not reality. They do this by commenting on their own construction. O’Brien accomplishes this in several ways. First, sometimes the characters in the story reveal that the stories they tell are made up. For example, Mitchell Sanders tells a story about a six-man patrol that goes up a mountain. Although he swears that it is true, he returns to the narrator later to tell him he made up “a few things,” calling attention to his story as an artificial construction. Second, O’Brien’s narrator also tells stories that are constructed and are not true. For example, he tells the story of a guy who jumps on a grenade to save his squad and dies. The narrator reports, “That’s a true story that never happened.” Finally, O’Brien’s narrator in the last section of the story tells the reader that all the stories he has told are untrue, that they are “just” stories, not events that really happened. This, of course, calls attention to the entire story as a work of fiction.

Calloway argues that metafictions open the possibility that reality itself is Active. Certainly, O’Brien suggests this may be the case by naming his narrator “Tim O’Brien” and giving the narrator a background very similar to his own. In so doing, he seems to suggest that there is really no distinction between the stories the fictional narrator tells and the stories the real O’Brien tells.

What separates Calloway’s critique from the author’s possible intent in this essay, however, is her claim that the stories in The Things They Carried, including “How to Tell a True War Story,” are “epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the way of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and vision.” Again, while the language is complicated, the ideas are not. Epistemol-ogy is the study of how people come to know what they know. It explores the basis of knowledge and truth. Thus, what Calloway seems to be arguing is that “How to Tell a True War Story” has value as a tool that helps readers understand better what being in a war is like. In other words, by viewing the Vietnam War through the many angles that O’Brien provides, the reader can have a “truer” vision of what the lived experience was like. By reading the story, a reader can have a better idea of what constitutes a true war story.

It is possible to demonstrate, however, that the opposite is the case, that someone reading “How to Tell a True War Story” may only think that he or she has more knowledge about war as a result of reading the story. Such a demonstration requires deconstructive reading. Deconstruction is a literary theory that contends that although readers and writers may seek the truth through writing, what they will have in the end is a literary construction, not the truth, even though sometimes it seems like the truth. Indeed, according to deconstructivists, text creates the illusion that words are firmly attached to meaning, and that it is possible to accurately describe reality through writing. However, they would emphasize this is only an illusion. Further, anything that has been constructed can be “deconstructed,” or shown to mean the opposite of what it seems to mean on the first reading. O’Brien is a deconstructive master. While it appears that he is saying one thing about true war stories, what he is really doing is undermining not only the entire quest for truth, but also the possibility of truth existing in any knowable form.

O’Brien provides for readers all the hammers and hacksaws they need to deconstruct his story. In the first place, the narrator offers at least four different accounts of Curt Lemon’s death. Each of these accounts is constructed slightly differently, with different emphasis and words. At the same time, the narrator tells the reader, “When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot.” Although the narrator claims that this is a true war story, it is also true that he has “missed a lot.” How can he be responsible for the truth of his story when he cannot account for the facts of the event simply because he did not see them?

In the second place, on the last page of the story, the narrator denies the truth of all of the stories that he has told within “How to Tell a True War Story.” The situation of this denial occurs when he has apparently shared the stories in a reading, just as the author Tim O’Brien would read the stories to an audience. The narrator says that often a woman will approach him after the reading and want to talk to him about the baby buffalo. He states,

All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. No... moss or white blossoms. Beginning to end, you tell her, it’s all made up. Every ... detail — the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it.

That all of the stories are made up ought not come as any surprise to the reader. After all, this is a work of fiction. What ought the reader do, however, with me pages of advice the narrator has offered, describing how to tell a true war story? How is this prose any different from the “made up” stories? That is, although the linking passages that describe “how to tell a true war story” seem to be qualitatively different from the story passages, in reality these passages are also constructed from language just as the stories are. Further, and more disturbingly, the entire story is told by a fictional narrator, including the passage, “This is true.” What then, ought the reader make of this?

While many critics have argued that O’Brien is attempting to demonstrate the difference between story-truth and happening-truth, it is at least possible that what he is demonstrating is the impossibility of any truth at all. Rather than being an epistemo-logical tool, this story serves to demonstrate how language only seems to provide knowledge, when all it really provides is more text. Indeed, even O’Brien’s fictional characters run into this paradox: truth-telling leads only and always to more text, not to truth itself. The writing calls attention to the absence of the event itself; all that remains is the continually constructed and deconstructed text that tries to recreate the event itself.

It may at least be possible that O’Brien’s project is significantly different from his narrator’s project. While the narrator tries throughout the story to make the reader believe that true war stories can be recognized by a certain arrangement of words, that true war stories are “never about war,” and that fiction is a way to get to the truth of an event, O’Brien may be doing something very different. Indeed, it appears that he undermines his own text. O’Brien writes,

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened, without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue.

This passage is extremely important because by using the words “grounding reality,” O’Brien is referring to some external and eternal truth that exists independently of words and storytellers. However, because even the notion of “grounding reality” occurs in an obviously fictional story, it suggests that the grounding reality may itself be nothing more than fiction. The narrator’s assertion that “you’d feel cheated,” is obviously true; if there is no grounding reality, but only the illusion created by texts, all of the great “truths” of the world tremble in a deconstructive earthquake.

It is human nature to seek the truth, and human nature to believe that such truth can be found. Readers want “How to Tell a True War Story” to be true at some level, to provide some insight into the ambiguity of the Vietnam War, to be an episte-mological tool. Read closely, however, the story becomes a cautionary tale for putting too much stock into any narrator at all and a warning about the illusory nature of texts.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on “How to Tell a True War Story,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Catherine Dybiec Holm

Holm is a published writer and editor with a master’s degree in natural resources. In this essay, Holm discusses the elusive nature of truth and reality in Tim O ‘Brien ’s work.

War stories bring the horrible truth of war home to the reader. Readers witness, through the author’s prose, the bloody realities of what it must be like to be engaged in combat and to wonder whether one will make it through the day alive. But truth as it relates to war for author Tim O’Brien is a shifting concept, one that is not rooted in anything concrete or recognizable. The elusive nature of truth and reality in war is made clear in O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story.”

The irony of O’Brien’s use of the word “true” in the title of this short piece (which the author calls fiction rather than a short story or nonfiction) is that for O’Brien there is no stable sense of truth or reality when it comes to war. The author shows readers this repeatedly, either through direct means (such as prose that addresses this issue) or indirect means (by using shifting narration to retell an incident using a different slant with each retelling). According to Rosemary King, in the Explicator, O’Brien uses the word “true” to mean “either factually accurate, or something higher and nobler.” But O’Brien’s complete title for this piece is also ironic since he suggests that it may actually be impossible to accurately tell a true war story.

Examples are evident from the start of “How to Tell a True War Story” of O’Brien’s unique treatment of truth as it applies to war stories. The author tells of two men in a combat unit in Vietnam. While taking a break during the day’s hike, Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley play a game of catch with smoke grenades, normally harmless. The object is not to chicken out but to catch the grenades and be covered with smoke. Lemon steps backward at one point into the sunlight and something explodes. He is blown to pieces into the air.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien refers to the incident with Lemon and Kiley three additional times. With each retelling, different events are emphasized. The second retelling reveals that Lemon actually stepped into a “booby-trapped 105 round,” which caused the explosion and his death. But this version focuses more on Kiley’s actions later in the day, which mirror the pain he feels over Lemon’s death. The men rescue a baby water buffalo, which Riley later shoots in a deliberate, slow fashion, to give the animal as much prolonged suffering as possible before it dies. O’Brien starts this version of the story with the statement, “This one does it for me. I’ve told it before — many times, many versions — but here’s what actually happened.”

When O’Brien tells the story of Lemon’s death the third time, he begins by saying “this one wakes me up,” as if to imply that he is telling the story for the first time. O’Brien seems intent on demonstrating that the horrors of war can affect the perception of reality, even for a narrator. And this version of Lemon’s death is truly horrible; it focuses on retrieving what’s left of Lemon’s remains from the tree near where the explosion took place.

The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.

O’Brien emphasizes the nebulous nature of truth when it comes to war stories by taking one story and telling it four different ways. Additionally, he starts several of the story versions with statements that make readers question whether the narrator realizes that he has told the story before. O’Brien’s device could lead an astute reader to wonder whether the reality of war and the retelling of this particular war story has become confusing, at least in this narrator’s head. And O’Brien’s narrator backs this up with prose that directly questions what is and is not real regarding memories of war.

For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel... of a great ghastly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.... In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Critic Steven Kaplan refers to the “undying uncertainty” of O’Brien’s narrator in this piece, and the rest of the pieces that comprise the collection The Things They Carried. According to Kaplan, most literature about Vietnam shares the certainty that “nothing was certain.” The author’s writings present facts and stories that:

are only temporarily certain and real; the strange “balance” in Vietnam between “crazy and almost crazy” always creeps back in and forces the mind that is remembering and retelling a story to remember and retell it one more time in a different form, adding different nuances, and then to tell it again one more time.

O’Brien’s prose suggests that part of the difficulty of nailing down truth in matters of war has to do with inherent contradictions. The narrator explains that “war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty.” The dichotomy of beauty and ugliness can be seen, for example, in “tracer rounds unwinding through the dark in brilliant red ribbons” or “the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare.... It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not.” The narrator also points out that a soldier’s constant need to stare death in the face actually brings him to feel even more alive, another contradiction: “In the midst of evil, you want to be a good man.... You are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”

In yet another example of the contradictory nature of truth in war stories, a character named Mitchell Sanders recalls a story of a combat unit in Vietnam that was ordered to hike into a remote, mountainous area and listen for any suspicious activity. Additionally, the men are to maintain strict silence for a week. After a few days, the men begin to hear music. Soon, they are hearing voices, wineglasses clinking, typical sounds of a cocktail party. None of this should be possible in such a remote area. Eventually the sounds turn into chamber music, opera, glee clubs, and chanting. It is more than the men can handle, to hear sounds coming from the rocks and the trees and the fog. They order all kinds of firepower, blast the area, and leave.

At this point in the story, the language used by the author seems to intentionally make it unclear as to whether the men actually succeeded in banishing the sound or not. Sanders says, “Around dawn things finally got quiet. Like you never even heard quiet before.... Everything’s all sucked up inside the fog. Not a single sound, except they still hear it.” This passage, particularly the last sentence, makes the reader wonder whether the men on the mission still heard the sound and how. Did memories of the music continue to reverberate in their heads, even though their logical minds heard no more sound in the woods around them? Or had they so lost their grip on reality and truth that they weren’t sure what they were hearing anymore?

In another interesting example of contradiction, Sanders talks to the narrator the next morning and changes the details of the story again. According to Sanders, he made up the parts about the guys hearing a glee club and an opera. But Sanders does not let the suggestion of sound go away completely, adding, “Yeah, but listen, it’s still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard sound you just plain won’t believe.” What is fact and what is fiction? Is O’Brien, as King suggests, “altering facts” rather than “clinging to the story of what actually transpired?” Apparently, this technique is true of much of the author’s work; Steven Kaplan comments that the author “destroys the fine line dividing fact from fiction and tries to show ... that fiction (or the imagined world) can often be truer... than fact.” O’Brien’s clever use of contradiction and the changing slant of a story could leave a reader feeling just as confused and bereft of reality as some of O’Brien’s characters.

What then, is a true war story? O’Brien may come closest to defining truth in “How to Tell a True War Story” when he says, “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” True to form, O’Brien ends “How to Tell a True War Story” with the suggestion that truth needs to be approached sideways in telling war stories. According to the author, a true war story is not about war, but about war’s related experiences.

It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do.... It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

Truth, for O’Brien, straddles the line between fact and fiction and is constantly shifting to capture the experience of war.

Source: Catherine Dybiec Holm, Critical Essay on “How to Tell a True War Story,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Sorrow of War (1995), by Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, offers a look at the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective. This novel uses many of the same literary techniques found in The Things They Carried.
• In the Lake of the Woods (1994), by Tim O’Brien, is a deeply troubling novel about the return to the United States of one Vietnam veteran and his inability to adjust to civilian life. The story is told with many metafictional devices. Although challenging to read, it is an important book for students of the Vietnam War.
• Song of Napalm (1988), by Bruce Weigl, is a collection of Vietnam War poetry. Weigl, along with Yusef Komunyakaa, John Balaban, and W. D. Earhart, is one of the most studied Vietnam War poets.
• Poems from Captured Documents (1994), selected and translated by Thanh T. Nguyen and Bruce Weigl, offers a collection of poems taken from the notebooks, journals, and diaries of soldiers who fought against the U.S. forces in Vietnam. The book offers facing-page originals and translations, making it possible for both Vietnamese and American students to read.
• Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) remains one of the classic novels of the Vietnam War. Set in Vietnam immediately before the battle of Dien Bien Phu, when the French lost their colonial hold on Vietnam, the novel offers a look at the early days that led inevitably to the conflict involving the United States.
• Tim O’Brien’s memoir If I Die in A Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) provides insight into the events that inspired the stories of The Things They Carried.
• Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984), by Wallace Terry, is a collection of memoirs from Vietnam veterans. It is especially noteworthy as it presents the memories of minority soldiers caught in the conflict.