O’Brien offers a story about Rat Kiley that he assures his readers is true: Rat’s friend, Curt Lemon, is killed, and Rat writes Lemon’s sister a letter. Rat’s letter talks about her brother and the crazy stunts he attempted. Rat believes the letter is poignant and personal; however, from Lemon’s sister’s viewpoint, it is inappropriate and disturbing. The sister never writes back, and Rat is offended and angered, as the reader is left to infer as the sister never returns the letter.
O’Brien suggests that Lemon’s sister’s failure to return the letter offers a kind of sad and true moral to the story. Lemon’s death, an accident resulting from a game of catch with a grenade, is described in detail. O’Brien remembers body parts strewn in the jungle trees and thinks about his own memories of the event. He comments that in true stories it is difficult to distinguish what actually happened from what seemed to happen, again blurring the line between truth and story.
O’Brien offers readers the advice that they should be skeptical, and offers a story told to him by Mitchell Sanders as an example. A patrol goes into the mountains for a weeklong operation to monitor enemy movement. The jungle is spooky, and the men start hearing strange, eerie noises which become an opera, a glee club, chanting, and so on, but the voices they hear are not human. Sanders says that the mountains, trees, and rocks were making the noise, and that the men called in massive firepower. He says a colonel later asked them why, and they do not answer because they know he will not understand their story. Sanders says that the moral is that nobody listens; the next day Sanders admits he made up parts of the story.
Next, O’Brien tells what following Lemon’s death: the unit comes across a baby water buffalo. Rat Kiley tries to feed it but it does not eat, so Kiley steps back and shoots the animal in its knee. Though crying, he continues to shoot the buffalo, aiming to hurt rather than kill it. Others dump the near dead buffalo in a well to kill it. O’Brien concludes that a true war story, like the one about the water buffalo, is never about war; these stories are about love, memory, and sorrow.
