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.
