How to Tell a True War Story

Ashley Estrada

Eng 102/ Tim O’Brian Blog #2

“Though it is odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in your life and in the world, all that might be lost” (O’Brian 78). This is a passage from the story, How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O’Brian. Oh, how true this passage is. It is not until we have lost, or are about to lose the important things in life do we appreciate them. If we were to live everyday as if it were our last, we would be stressless, spontaneous people wouldn’t we? In How to Tell a True War Story, O’Brian tells us about a soldier named “Rat”. He lost his best friend in war, and took this very hard.

Rat, and his late friend, Curt Lemon shared a series of good times and memories with each other. After Lemon passed away, Rat wrote a letter to Lemon’s sister, informing her of the bad news. Unfortunately, she never had the courtesy to write him a response. This must have hurt. Rat took this very hard as well. Throughout the story, we see that Rat is a very emotionally-driven person. Emotion easily takes control of his actions.

One example of his loss of control due to emotions was his incident with the buffalo. He and a few other soldiers find and capture a baby buffalo. That night, Rat goes out of control. He begins shooting the buffalo. He was not shooting it to kill, but to torture. This was a fairly disturbing scene in the story. It was real. I like real stories. Stories that put a “sugar-coating” on the truth to be easier on the reader’s ears and feelings are not real. This made the overall moral of the story come to life. Hence the title, How to Tell a True War Story.

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In a war these are the thoughts of the soldiers. Their thoughts are not completely focused on the terrible things. This is why in a true war story, it seems to be fake. “The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (O’Brian 68).