War as Hell Tim O\'Brien\'s

War as Hell

Tim O'Brien's Visions of Hell in His Short Story "How to Tell a True War Story"

In "How to Tell a True War Story," author and veteran Tim O'Brien makes it very clear that generalizations about war simply don't hold up. True war stories, he insists, "do not indulge in abstraction or analysis." According to O'Brien, there is no deeper meaning to be found in a true story of war, and no real pattern of cause and effect. There is only a mass of observations and contradictions such as ugliness and beauty, difference and similarity, insanity and normalcy, certain death and uncertain survival. This is especially true for O'Brien when it comes to overly simplistic moral platitudes such as "war is hell." O'Brien claims that this cannot be fully true because it generalizes, and is too easy to accept without understanding the abstraction it implies. Yet the description he gives of war is certainly of a hellish environment, and this is the problem with identifying truth in a war story -- nothing is necessarily or completely untrue. Though O'Brien seems to insist that there are truths to be found in a war story, though "a true war story is never about war." It is this schism that makes war hell, as the physical environment, internal mental state, and future lives of the soldiers deteriorate because of something so unreal.

The environment that the soldiers find themselves in constitutes the first division in and deterioration of reality. It is at once unreal and yet so ever-present, solid and pervasive that it becomes impossible to conceive of reality beyond it. The environment completely takes over the sense and mental states of the soldiers such that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between hallucination and reality. As Mitchell Sanders tells it in his story within the story, "The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam, the place talks." The environment sinks under their skin, uncomfortable and yet unavoidable -- in short, hell.

There is also a growing sense of insanity among the men that O'Brien describes in this story. There is the crack-up of the team that Mitchell Sanders describes, and the idea of playing catch with a smoke grenade as an idea of fun -- both of these instance reflect a certain necessary insanity. Without going a little crazy, these men would lose their minds. Any situation where insanity becomes necessary to retain sanity, and thus where insanity becomes normal, must be a type of hell. This confusion is most clearly reflected in Rat's letter to Lemon's sister; telling a grieving family member about how her brother went "out on ambush almost stark naked, just boots and balls and an M-16" shows the level of disconnect from "normal" normal.