Truth In War

War is a destruction to the peace of mankind. As an unnatural source of conflict where soldiers had sacrificed their lives for their country, war transformed soldiers for a lifetime as it opened their eyes to an unseen world of inhumanity. To express a soldier’s experience in war, the literary device of truth, happening truth is used, which consists of facts stated bluntly with no inclusion of fiction and is the basis of story truth, fiction that consists of true feelings but not true occurrences. The dark and fast paced nature of war often caused a soldier’s perception to be blurred, altering their perspective of the truth. Often brutalities and traumatizing experiences are difficult to both retell and to relive because it is nearly impossible

Such an emotional experience cannot be altered or fixed because it takes away from portraying the nature of war. No false assumptions or lies are told in happening truth, instead displaying what truly happened and not what one imagined war to be. . As O'Brien elaborates “You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue”. Only actual occurrences can support how war really looked like, used with undramatized perspectives, deriving facts instead. Happening truth is truer than story truth because it is the basis of any story told. All stories are based on reality and would not exist without its existence. In the end, readers cannot be fooled by false information just as one can tell a knock off from what is real, “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told makes the stomach believe.” Stories are not told for the audience's convenience but instead are told to share what war truly looks like, the events of war, and how soldiers reacted from the sudden trauma of war. Only people that have lived through the war can translate their feelings to show the reality of war. Instead of providing readers with unrealistic events and emotions that have been overthought to an artificial point, happening truth shows war for how it is and it’s

When one relives the real memories of a soldier, they can see the brutal imagery of war in their imaginations and understand why the horrors of war cause an everlasting trauma. Happening truth shows how the experiences of war have a heavy impact on the soldier, reciprocating the impact to the audience. The facts provided by real experiences provides a visual imagery of the brutalities of war. A true feeling of war can be felt by from new emotions experienced only in war, emotions that are real. Since the truth is told, readers build a connection and trust with the writer and work in its reliability. Just as Tim O’Brien’s novel shows that happening truth is truer in depicting the nature of war, the nonfiction war novel, “Unbroken”, does the same. The moving war novel, “Unbroken”, provides a detailed description of war which successfully shows that real occurrences are emotional even without added emotion, trauma experienced is forever remembered, and that happening truth has a bigger effect on readers because they know it has occurred. Only happening truth can describe the cold truth of war such as a bomb killing a dozen of soldiers within seconds, instead of producing an emotional fairy tale like fantasy that does not exist in real