Beyond Physical Pain

    “How to Tell a True War Story” is a difficult chapter to read.  Tim O’Brien writes this chapter to show the reader that the truth of war stories will never be clear to someone who did not live the story.  Simply hearing these war stories cannot make someone sufficiently understand what happened.  The survivors are the only ones who can truly understand what happened.  And even then, as O’Brien writes, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen,” (67). 
     This chapter highlights the fact that war stories are not necessarily always about intense combat and death, but rather they can be about instances that defined emotions and pain in different ways.  The story about the baby water buffalo seems to have little to do with the actual Vietnam war; however, it vividly displays the pain that Rat Kiley experienced when he lost his best friend.  This is an extremely emotional passage to read because it expresses Rat's hurt in such a way that can only be imagined by the reader.  These war stories are about times when side effects of the war hurt people so deeply that the truth of how much hurt the war caused them is impossible to explain to someone.  Readers can only get a small sense for the pain these soldiers went through.  Words cannot adequately convey pain, suffering, and loss.  O'Brien explains, "He wanted me to feel the truth, to believe by the raw force of feeling," (70).  Experience is the only way to understand, and O'Brien shows us that even the stories that have little to do with physical combat are ways of showing how terrible war truly is.