69).
For O'Brien there is no moral or rectitude in a war story because even what is good and beautiful in it comes from an obscene and evil motive. It is impossible, in a true war story, for a soldier to die declaring that he is glad to have died for his country, as does happen in We Were Soldiers. In a true war story no one is glad to die, neither for their country nor for their comrades; in a true war story people die because they are afraid of being called cowards. We Were Soldiers screams that war is hell, but Kiley, much more eloquently declares, that war is the retaliatory death by torture of a baby water buffalo.
We Were Soldiers could not be obscene or rooted in evil because no sensible American audience would have accepted it then. Sensible Americans like things that feel good and the obscenity and evil of a true war story shames and embarrasses. We Were Soldiers, in order to appeal to that audience, had to connect to it through national pride and the uplifting victory at the movie's end. In an O'Brien war story there is no national...
In an O'Brien war story there is no victory, only survival and even that is dubious.
Sometime early in the 90s, perhaps during the filming of Braveheart, it seems that Mel Gibson developed this tried-and-true, red-and-blue nationalism and felt, thereafter, compelled to reproduce the Braveheart story in as many American-centric permutations as possible. His flagship movie of the time was entitled the Patriot, even. We Were Soldiers continues this trend of be-proud-of-American-military-heritage, and so could never be true. Gibson's image of war as a proud and difficult thing could not be farther from that of O'Brien, one of the Vietnam War's most eloquent survivors. It is likely that, too O'Brien at least, Gibson too is just another "dumb cooze."
Bibliography
1. O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Random House, 1990. Print.
2. SparkNotes Editors. "SparkNote on the Things They Carried." SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 6 May 2010.
