Tim O'brien Essay

Tim O'brien tells stories of the war in Vietnam. He starts off with the death of Curt Lemon. Curt's best friend Rat, writes a letter to his sister telling her how great of a man he was. After no response he calls her a dumb cooze. O'brien goes on to explain how Curt died. Rat and Curt played a game they call yellow mother, where they threw a smoke grenade back and forth until one of them chickened out or it went off. Who ever had it last was the yellow mother. Rat threw the smoke grenade to far and Curt ended up stepping on a booby trap and blowing up. His body landed up in a tree. So a couple guys from the platoon had to climb the tree and retrieve the body parts. O'brien combats the gore of the scene by covering up how terrible it really was. He says how it was almost beautiful because of the sun rays coming down through the trees.

What I ended up taking away from this was soldiers at war see a lot of bad things, but when they come back and/or tell the stories they end up not telling the whole thing, or make it out better than what it was. That the soldiers invent some of the stories or at least parts of them. Basically that it is hard to distinguish between the true war experience and story telling.