We Were Soldiers as a True War Story: An O'Brien Analysis

Introduction: O'Brien's Standard for 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). Tim 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 through 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 through 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 declared of Randall Wallace, "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 because the public does not want the truth.

Dignity vs. Obscenity: What the Film Gets Wrong

"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, bravery in war was simply cowardice toward reputation. He writes: "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).

Moral Rectitude and the Lie of Uplift

For O'Brien there is no morality or rectitude in a true 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 — yet that is precisely what happens 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 Rat Kiley, far more eloquently, declares that war is the retaliatory death by torture of a baby water buffalo.

Conclusion: Why We Were Soldiers Is Not a True War Story

It is likely that, to O'Brien at least, Gibson too is just another "dumb cooze." Gibson's vision of war flatters its audience; O'Brien's unsettles and shames them. That difference is precisely what separates a popular war story from a true one.

Works Cited

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Random House, 1990. Print.