O’Brien offers abstract commentary on storytelling and blurs the divisions between truth and fiction and author and authorial persona through a series of paradoxical reversals. The primary examples are the paragraphs that begin and end the chapter. O’Brien immediately brands the story as true. In a direct address to readers he claims, “this is true.” In the final paragraphs, O’Brien reverses this claim by redefining truth. “None of it happened,” he writes, “none of it.” Central to understanding the chapter is charting O’Brien’s progression of calling the story absolutely true to calling the veracity of the story and the reliability of the “O’Brien” persona narrator into question. O’Brien does not lie—he changes the definition of telling the truth.
In this vignette, O’Brien presents two stories that fail to be “true” to their intended audiences. The first example is the “few stories” Rat Kiley includes in his letter to Curt Lemon’s sister. To Rat, these stories about Lemon’s extreme and questionable acts are true, and he wants to convey this truth to the sister, who fails to respond because she understands the stories in completely antithetical ways.
Rat Kiley and Lemon’s sister belong to different interpretive communities; they have different sets of experiences and expectations that they use to understand stories. The result is a radical difference in how they understand and feel the same “actual” events of a story. O’Brien carries this idea of competing communities of interpretation over to the text, which he demonstrates through his appraisal of the response of the woman who tells him he likes the story of the buffalo. She doesn’t get the real truth of the story, which is Rat’s fraternal love for Lemon, because she belongs to a different interpretive community.
O’Brien is commenting on readers and hearers of stories. Readers must remember that they are reading a story, by a fictional author, about listening to stories and can, unlike Lemon’s sister, feel a personal response to the story’s outcome. The story takes on a message of truth because of the context of the unanswered letter. On the one hand, Lemon’s sister does respond, but on the other hand, her response is in the act of not answering Rat’s letter. It is this action that makes the reader align his or her sympathies with Rat, and that solicitation of feeling from the reader is what makes the story “true.” The story, O’Brien writes, “[is] so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.”
The second story that fails to connect its meaning with its hearer is the fantastic and spooky story that Mitchell Sanders tells about the squad who was assigned to listen for signs of enemy movement. Just as O’Brien does in the chapter’s first sentence, Sanders emphasizes that the story is true because it actually happened. Even though Sanders admits that he embellished the story—and that it technically is not “true” because it did not actually happen—this is irrelevant to O’Brien. Given the criteria on which he bases the “truth” of stories, Sanders’s story has a kernel of truth in it: It is nearly true. O’Brien writes, “I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth.”
In this sense, O’Brien’s analysis of Sanders’s story recalls the title of the chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story.” It suggests a second meaning to be applied to the readers and hearers of stories: that readers and hearers can “tell,” or discern, stories that hold a truth, regardless of whether the events of the story actually occurred, based on certain criteria. According to O’Brien, the truth of a story depends solely on the audience hearing it told.
The common denominator for O’Brien is finally “gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” O’Brien demonstrates this idea by employing repetition. A noteworthy example is the four varying accounts of Curt Lemon’s death within the chapter. Each retelling is embellished until finally a “true” version emerges that viscerally affects “O’Brien,” and by extension, the reader. The details of O’Brien’s nightmare flashback—Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree”—cinch the story as true. O’Brien assents that “truth” is gauged by the responses stories evoke: “. . . if I could ever get the story right. . . then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must’ve been the final truth.” O’Brien revives the trope of meta-narrative commentary as the story has been recreated in this fictional writer’s memoir, which is in fact not true, but true enough to move the reader to identify emotionally with O’Brien and to share in his experiences through the use of imagination and sympathy.
