Vethuizen's How To Tell A True War Story

In situations that face violence and tragedy, these stories are less accurate and more about explaining the experience these stories have the teller of that story. Violence is a factor in the retelling of events, affecting the accuracy of the storytelling. Vethuizen writes, “Finding the truth is even more of a challenge if it is intentionally hidden or forgotten or manipulated. In the case of dramatic events, such as violent conflict, one may instinctively change the facts to make the experience acceptable to the listener which is always a challenge for research into violent conflict” (Vethuizen 19-20). This is even more clear when the narrator in “How to Tell a True War Story” explains how adding and removing details to the stories

helped get to the real truth behind the stories. These stories are manipulated to try to explain war the best it can be described to people who were not there to bare witness. Especially surrounding the concerns about telling a war story, the narrator insists that generalizing war diminishes the effect of telling war stories because war is many truths and they tend to contradict themselves. The narrator claims, “War is thrilling; war is drudgery.

War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory” (O’Brien 181). The violence that the narrator witnesses and inflicts is part of the reason why his testimonies conflict with each other. Furthermore, these violent experiences shift the truth of these experiences from the actual events that occurred and the “real” truth that is warped by the violence and jumbled memories. Vethuizen explains, “Seeking the truth about violent conflict also requires sufficient time to allow for the discovery of accurate explanations in the space where it happened, to evaluate, analyze, and reflect on all the perspectives and to judge where power relationships and continued strategic contests distort perspectives” (Vethuizen 22). Even as Vethuizen suggests that evaluating the truths told in a story is adjusted because of the violence reflected through their experiences. Even the violence can cause a silence that has no words to describe their story. Sanders tells the narrator, “But the guys don’t say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funnylike, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can’t ever say…because certain stories you don’t ever tell” (O’Brien

178). This passage suggests that there are stories that people are not capable of telling, even if they do want to. This onset of silence is caused by the violence and disturbing nature of the experiences these soldiers endure, preventing them from telling these stories.
The question remains that with violence and jumbled memories, how does one find the actual truth through the shroud of faulty testimony and disorienting violence-induced versions of the truth. Vethuizen then describes how to find the “truth” in these stories with the means of deduction and logic. Vethuizen claims that the valid truth must be coherent while also being noted with the “accuracy” and “critical reflection” to look at the story and see where the facts of said story fall in with one another, and if there is coherence in that reflection, then the story can be taken as a true one (Vethuizen 21). By reflecting on the facts of the story, audiences can understand the causes of the differing accounts of the same events. Venthuizen also accepts that “Two different accounts can be accepted as true even when one account is better or more accurate than the other or at least equally valid” (Vethuizen 23). Because to the narrator, “how to tell a true war story” is not about the truth itself, but rather, all accounts of the events matter just as Vethuizen suggests. As the narrator states, the truth is not the roots of a war story, for war stories do not need the exact truth to reach the truth that the narrator is desperate for the audience to understand. The narrator says, “Anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth… A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (O’Brien 182).
The war stories the narrator is insistent on still being told do not need to have exact details, but it speaks to the “real” truth of war. Towards the end of the story, the narrator describes a situation where a soldier jumps on a live grenade to save his friends, but instead, the grenade kills them all. The story did not happen, but the narrator claims, “That’s a true story that never happened” (O’Brien 182). He insinuates that there is an underlying truth that does not need a factual story to exist. The idea is that a story needs to speak to the soldiers’ true experience because war stories are not essential about war, they are about the people who live through them. At the very end of the story, the narrator defines the truth about war stories and how changing the story piece by piece will reach this underlying truth of war: “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. It was a ghost story. But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth” (O’Brien 183). This real truth is far more important to the narrator’s overall story than it is to the exact stories he tells in “How to tell a True War Story”. This truth is about the tragedies of war, the experiences that words could not even closely resemble, and so, the narrator feels that he must keep changing the story until someone finally understand that experience he had endured.
Through the storytelling and the inquiry of the truth, the narrator tries to discover the real “truth” hidden in war stories. The story is built around the structure of instructions on how to tell a war story and uses the struggles of telling the truth in the face of great tragedy. The difficulties with disorienting memories and violence are factors to the mixed versions of the truth as reflected in the story. The underlying truth is revealed to be more essential to the narrator and to war stories than the actual depiction of events. This discovery of the truth as it relates to the story is crucial to understanding the importance of sharing the stories of soldiers who experience tragedies that words hardly can describe. By seeing the importance of the narrator’s struggle with the meaning of the truth, it helps us have a better understanding to our own reflection of the truth as well as understanding the experiences people face is more important than the exact truth of the story.