In the Absence of Truth, There is Freedom

In the broadest and most basic view of war, tension exists between one side and the other, whether it be disputes over land, ideological divides, or tensions so old their origins are unknown altogether. Beyond this central conflict, there exists tension within every soldier’s mind as they are burdened with the difficult realities of war. Although war is full of these opposing forces, there is one aspect of war where soldiers are relieved, where they are freed from conflict altogether. This freedom comes with the irrelevancy of truth. As O’Brien explained, war knows no truth. He adds that “the old rules are no longer binding, the old truths are no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos” (78).  Because everything is so muddled, confusing, and foreign to real life, the need to explain the truth disappears. The experiences of war are so brutal and inhumane that, almost as a mental safety precaution, they become incomprehensible to the human mind. To understand them is to lose all faith in humanity. When Rat Kiley kills the baby buffalo, nobody attempts to explain his behavior, to find the meaning behind his brutality. Instead the men stand there and say nothing until Sauders simply says, “Well, that’s Nam” (76).  In normal life, far away from war, we carry the burden of trying to explain why things happen and their meaning. We over analyze, we value the truth over almost everything else. In the hell that was the Vietnam War, morals and truth do not exist at all, thereby freeing the men from struggling over the meaning of events and what is true in their experience. Saunders tells the men to listen for the moral, yet there is nothing but silence. This lack of morality, although dangerous, is also incredibly freeing. O’Brien explains how “there is an aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference-a powerful implacable beauty” (77). In a war filled with extreme brutality and internal turmoil, where the possibility of death creates tension in every moment of every day, the men can seek out this small and beautiful freedom. The weight of morality and the truth become one less thing to carry.