O'Brien and the Effect of 'Story-Truth'

The typical war story/movie genre is one of action and emotion. The soldiers face death every day and are affected psychologically by it. Mostly, these works have a gloom-and -doom attitude with little bits of humor, either way it's usually to gain honor. The expectations of the audience of a typical war story are most likely to be impressed by the weaponry soldiers were given and the action to follow, moved by the sad events they are dealt with everyday, to understand the importance of camaraderie and to follow the adventures of a ‘hero’. Most war stories are also nostalgic to war veterans who can say to themselves ‘I was there’ and want to compare the story to their experience.

These three stories work against the expectations of the war story genre because they’re mostly about naive emotions regarding the speaker’s experience of war. He just remembers the most poignant moments the before and after of battle. It seems as though everything in between is a blur. It must have been very traumatic. At the time, his fellow war buddies were young and they would just goof around. O’Brien even admits in Spin, “the average age in our platoon I’d guess was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school” He even gives the audience a moment “Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender’s puppy. ‘What’s everybody so upset about? Christ, I’m just a boy’” (39-40).

The stories have the feel of a historical fiction; they’re not a complete fabrication, so most of what the author says is truth. They also have the feel of a memoir and so the audience may believe everything that happened. However, we learn he “walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier, almost everything else is invented” (203). His form, even distinguishes, which most war stories do not, that he feels ‘story truth’ is more striking than ‘happening truth’. Truth that “there were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and afraid to look” (203). This confession is to the audience’s surprise, perhaps, because we’re usually expecting a brave character that can face anything. For example, we think O’Brien has looked death in the face. We believe he’s seen a fallen soldier up close, “his jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole” (139). This horrible image, we believe, has not been confronted until now, several years later in O'Brien's life. This way of writing is probably the most effective way of portraying his time during the war. Admitting the embellishment and re-imagining is also a twist in the story that most typical war stories wouldn’t admit, especially not from the main character.