Soldiers How to Tell if

¶ … Soldiers

How to Tell if We Were Soldiers is a True War Story

"As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil," (O'Brien, p.69). O'Brien's definition of a true war story is an indictment against the largest body of Hollywood war movies; it denies that any human audience should ever want to sit for a true war story, and, therefore, any popular war story -- any story that does well at the box office -- must not be true. Had O'Brien sat for Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers, he might have picked out some true elements -- at points the movie does give that visceral feeling which O'Brien claims is at the center of a war story -- but, by and large, he would have sneered, spat, and of Randall Wallace declared, "Dumb cooze." We Were Soldiers fails to be true by pandering to the sensibility and national pride of the public, as well as the desire to draw some sort of victory -- both moral and physical -- out of the script. Certainly the movie was successful, but only by recognizing that the public does not want the truth.

"You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you," (O'Brien, p.69), but We Were Soldiers is never embarrassing. Embarrassing is Rat Kiley torturing a baby water buffalo to death; embarrassing is the knowledge that, however hateful it was, we ourselves would not have tried to stop Kiley; embarrassing is the knowledge that the torture of the baby water buffalo was necessary and true. We Were Soldiers, however, is permeated by a sense of dignity, by pride, by the code of the warrior. While the movie does not approve of war, it does cast it in the light of moral rectitude; it affirms that bravery is courage in the face of fear. For O'Brien the bravery of war was simply cowardice towards reputation. For O'Brien,

If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old lie, (O'Brien, p.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 pride, men fight because they are too scared to run. In an O'Brien war story there is no victory, only survival and even that is dubious.