Tim O’Brien, "How to Tell a True War Story"


1. The anecdotes in Tim O’Brien’s "How to Tell a True War Story"--the story of Curt Lemon’s death and Mitchell Sanders’s story about the listening-post patrol--are told several times with several revisions. Why is this necessary? What is the problem with the stories about Curt Lemon that Rat Kiley sends in his letter to Lemon’s sister? How are this opening anecdote and the ending of the story related? How is the storyteller’s task complicated by an unreceptive audience? What does the narrator mean when he says toward the end of the story that "you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it"?

2. This story can be read as a critique of the idea of "truth" itself. How does the story problematize the relationships between truth and other values or ideas with which it has traditionally been linked, among them, morality ("A true war story is never moral"); fact ("In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen"); belief ("In many cases a true story cannot be believed"); and abstraction and analysis ("True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis"). Why is it "safe to say that in a true war story, nothing much is ever very true"? How can a thing "happen and be a total lie," or "not happen and be truer than the truth"?

3. Throughout this story, O’Brien uses military slang, some of it particular to the Vietnam War: "strack," "doing recon," "villes," "arty," "Willie Peter," "HE," "LZ," "VC," etc. What effect does this have on the general reader? How does this specific use of language help to convey the point(s) of the story?

4. Early in the story, the narrator warns, "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." What is that lie, who tells it, and why? Toward the end, the narrator tells a story about a soldier who jumps on a grenade in an attempt to save his comrades. What happens in the often-repeated Hollywood version of this narrative? What makes this particular version (the narrator’s) "a true story" even though it "never happened"?