'How To Tell A True War Story'

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Simone Jones February 6, 2013 Ballard 5B The Things They Carried What separates the truth from a tale? One person’s truth may be different from another person’s truth. That does not mean it is a tale simply because someone’s perspective can be totally different from the next person. The truth is not how something happens; the truth is what happens and how it is retold. So how are a tale and the truth distinguished? In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien gives a certain criteria to a true war story that allows the reader to determine whether the story is true or not, based on morality, exaggeration, difficulty, meaning, and more. “It doesn’t suggest proper human behavior,” states O’Brien. In “Sweetheart of the Song of Tra Bong,” Mary Anne displays strange behavior. From the story Rat Kiley is telling, she goes from a beautiful sweetheart, to an ugly land loving creature. After so many days in Vietnam, she begins to walk barefoot, not clip her nails, cuts her hair short and no longer cares about her hygiene. She also wears a tongue of…show more content…
In “Flies,” the speaker uses exaggeration to tell the reader about what happened to his brother when his grandmother hit him with her cane, “there was blood coming out of his face, his nose.” How did that happened from just a hit with a cane? Kiley’s entire story is an exaggeration. He goes in to detail about every single thing. Abnormity extends through the stories. Kiley’s story is far from normal. A teenage girl wearing tongues around her neck, who does not care about hygiene, who sneaks off and disappears, and most importantly, a teenage girl who goes to war. In “Flies,” the speaker states, “I hear him crying or maybe it’s me or someone else.” It is abnormal for someone to not know if they are crying or not. Both poem and story are unbelievable. Why and how does a 17 year old girl get to Vietnam and why does the speaker kill his grandmother over the
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