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-Friendship
-Morality and Death
-Pain
-Trust

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-Morality
-Shame and Guilt
-Anger and Agression

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Morality
Trauma
Guilt
Coming to term with the past

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"This is why I keep writing war stories:
He was a short, slender young man of about twenty." - pg.125

"I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty." - pg.126

"I had already thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it." - pg.127

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Lee Jensen
David Strunks

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Kathleen
The platoon
The soldier

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"There was nothing much anybody could do except wait for the dustoff."

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Shows how feelings in war change so quickly and the things that war brings out in people. In chapter 4 it is almost insane that with his own weapon he breaks his nose in order to show to Strunk that they are equal. It also shows how they soldiers try to act tough but when something happens to them they are scared. This is shown in chapter 5 when Strunk gets shot and begs Jensen not to kill him even though they made a pact about if one of them gets hurt they will finish the other off in order to get them out of their suffering.

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"The thing is, I believed in God and all that, but it wasn't the religious part that interested me. Just being nice to people, that's all. Being decent."
-Dobbins, pg.115

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-Religion
-Peace
-Guilt
-Hospitality
-Treating people right

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Over time Jensen and Strunk learn to trust each other. They create a pact in order to consolidate their friendship. They agree that if any one of them gets seriously injured during a fire fight that the other one would kill them to get them out their suffering. One day Strunk gets shot and begs Jensen not to kill him. He then died in the helicopter that was transporting him.

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The church and its monks are a huge contradiction to the situation unfolding. The platoon marches through chaos only to set camp in a holy building. Churches are a symbol of order and friendliness, which makes the platoon staying in one morally questionable. But by this logic, the entire presence of american soldiers in Vietnam could be seen as immoral.
The monk's willingness to cooperate and help american soldiers which are invading their country plants doubt into the minds of the men, wondering how many innocent civilians similar to these monks they nave mercilessly bombarded.

O'Brien also details the monks cleaning a machine gun. The situational irony here stems from god-abiding monks helping enable a machine of destruction and death.

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- Henry Dobbins
- Image of his girlfriend

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'The dentist couldn't find any problem, but Lemon kept on insisting'.  p.84

'There was some pain, no doubt, but in the morning Curt Lemon was all smiles.' p.84

'For the rest of the day he stayed off by himself, sitting alone under a tree, just staring down at the field tent.' p.84

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Link to summary resource

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"Tim, it's a war." - Kiowa, pg.120

"He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village and his people." - pg.124

"He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty." - pg.124

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Death and murder
Guilt
Trauma
War and its impact

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-Shame
- Hiding your Weaknesses
- Manliness

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- Curt Lemon
- The Dentist

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Love/Relationships between soldiers and women
Heartbreak
Superstition
Memories before war
Emotional burden

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Tim O'Brien
Kiowa
Azar
The dead guy?

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- Mary Anne Bell
- Mark Fossie
- Rat Kiley
- Mitchell Sanders
- Eddie Diamond
- six Greenies

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Deeper Analysis_How to Tell a True War Story

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Chapter about how two soldiers mistrust each other over a pocket knife. Jensen breaks Strunks nose because he thinks that he stole the phone. Jensen become scared about what will Strunk do to get revenge and he ends up breaking his own nose with a handle of a pistol in order to call it even.

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-Truth
-How war dehumanises
-Love and home
-Death and Trauma
-Storytelling

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"He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes back." p.65

"When he died it was almost beautiful" p.67

"It's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." p.67

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The subjection of truth to storytelling
Physical and emotional burdens
Love
War and its effect on people
Innocence

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-Bob 'Rat' Kiley
-Curt Lemon
-Mitchell Sanders
-Norman Bowker
-Kiowa
-Dave Jensen

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Two monks from the church
The platoon, mostly O'Brien, Dobbins and Kiowa

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"Jensen got into a fistfight. It was about something stupid - a missing jackknife - but even so the fight was vicious."

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Characters

·      Tim O’Brien

·      Azar

·      Little boy

·      Mitchell Sanders

·      Norman Bowker

·      Henry Dobbins

·      Ted Lavender

·      Old guy on the mine field

·      Rat Kiley

·      Jimmy Cross

·      Lee Strunk

·      Kathleen (daughter)

·      Red cross nurse

·      Dave Jensen

·      Kiowa

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- Tim O'Brien
- Elroy Berdahl
-Tim's parents(mother and father)
- Jimmy Cross

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"This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone." -page 37

" I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything." -page 39, 9 lines from the bottom

"... I was drafted for a war I hated."

"Would you do it? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself?" -page 54

"I was a coward. I went to a war." -page 58. last line

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1). "This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife." (pg. 39)

From the first sentence of this chapter a confessionary tone is set. Through the use of the word "never" the author strives to impress the audience and trigger their curiosity into what happened in the story the author is about to reveal that forced him to hide it for so many years after the war.

The fact that he repeats the words "not to my" when mentioning the members of his family symbolizes the idea that this is an unresolved story, a secret one, that Tim O'Brien hid from his mother, father, brother, sister and wife because it most certainly, made him feel ashamed. However, once again, we readers are invaded by the question of the "What happened?".

2). "...I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons." (pg. 40)

This quote talks about some of the feelings a young Tim O'Brien had towards the war when it was still in development. Although he recognizes himself as "young" and "naive" with no true experience about the world, he expresses a subtle hate towards war through the phrase "certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons" where the "certain blood" represents the blood of innocent people, like the soldiers for instance, and the "uncertain reasons" symbolizes O'Brien's belief that the Vietnam war had no defined cause for its occurrence.

3). "It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of the cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead." (pg. 41)

This fragment is another view into the author's mind. In it, Tim O'Brien expresses his disagreement to the development of the Vietnamese war and in his point of view he considers it a war without a "knowing why" meaning, a defined cause. As well, he emphasizes the idea that "war is cruel" and that it leads to mistakes, for instance the death of people. He concludes this section of the book with the sentence "once people are dead, you can 't make them undead" which suggests that war is the synonym of death and that once you join it, there's no turning back.

4). "I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure." (pgs. 44-45)

This quote connects to the idea of "the fear of blushing" discussed on chapter 1. In it, we see how the author admits to the reader, and only to him, his fear of dying in a war he doesn't understand, but we also take part in an internal dilemma where the question "going or leaving" is always present.

We are faced with the author's fear of embarrassment and how deep inside he wants to flee to Canada and forget the war and the deaths that come with it, but how his idea of "what will other people say about him" stops him before he comes to a concrete decision of whether or not he wants to go to the war.

However, the main idea of this fragment is to get the reader thinking " what makes a coward a coward? And how do we judge him like that? By what actions?" because although we sympathize with O'Brien's fear of dying we are also at a crossroad of what we would do if we were in a similar situation. Would we also fear ridicule and censure?

However, the author also exposes us, in this quote, to the fear of blushing and the power of conscience. O'Brien claims that he is Nevertheless, he is ashamed, deep inside, of thinking the way he does (the Vietnamese War is absurd) and thus he often, in this chapter, is attacked by his conscience, who acts as the force that pulls him back to the war through the This fragment belongs to the climax of the chapter as it is the section where the narrator realizes he would not do the right thing. In this quote, the narrator explains why he hasn't told this story before and it is because of his inability to decide, because of his " This quote is an emphasis to the greatest burdens of a soldier: 5). "What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame...I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing." (pg. 52)

This quote belongs to the section of the book where the young Tim O'Brien decides to leave his hometown and travel down to Canada to escape the war. On his journey, he stops by a lodge where he meets a man that he claims "saved his life." He stays in the lodge for six days where we readers are exposed to his mind and ideas. We feel his fear, a sense of sickness, of going to war and dying there, and we are exposed to his rage for having been chosen as a possible soldier.
"ashamed to be doing the right thing." But what does this "right thing" mean ? Well, for him it symbolizes, not being part of something he doesn't understand.
"fear of embarrassment", and it is this conscience that tells him that it is wrong to flee the war for the coward reason that he doesn't want to die in it. And these are the dilemmas (him vs. conscience and him vs. war) that are presented in this quote.
6). "Now, perhaps, you can understand why I've never told this story before. It's not just the embarrassment of the tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart....I would not do what I should do. I would not swim from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave..." (pg. 57)
paralysis", as he calls it, of not being capable of saying "I'm not going to the war because I'm scared and I don't want to die."
We readers are confronted with a vulnerable character, one that accepts defeat, and specifically in this quote, accepts the fact that the "macho-man" posture all humans claim having is just a fake attempt to cover our sensible and childish side, the one who is scared of dying, the one who is scared of becoming a murderer. We understand how this "tough-guy" fantasy dissolves when we are presented with a cruel reality, as war is, one that comes with hard decisions and thus hard consequences, and we realize that it takes even more courage to follow a dream than to assist a war.

7). "...I would go to the war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was embarrassed not so. That was the sad thing." (pg. 59)
"the fear of blushing" and "the fear of embarrassment." It summarizes how they rule a person's life, even one that doesn't truly believe in the war, simply because of the terror of what other's might think of your actions. In it we see how the conscience beats the narrator and how he cannot stand the probable mockery of those who would have judge him if he didn't attend war. He decides to die at war and be considered a hero than not die in it and be considered a coward, which incites reflection in us readers and makes us think: "could we consider Tim O'Brien's actions, a young boy's actions, true acts of cowardice?"

8). "...and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war." (pg. 61) These sentences finalize the chapter "On the Rainy River" and for me, they are of vital importance because they have an ironic meaning. Usually, those who attend war are considered heroes, brave men that fight for their country, but O'Brien classifies himself, in this quote, as "a coward" because he participates in the war. So what is the irony?
The irony lies in the idea that Tim O'Brien is a coward for fighting. However, the essence of the chapter is discovering why he consideres himself to be a coward if he fought in war, and this is because he wasn't able to say no. He wasn't capable of running to Canada and leaving something he didn't belief in. He wasn't capable of standing up to his beliefs and following what he considered right. As a matter of fact, the cowardice lies in his lack of bravery, not for not wanting to die, but for not being able to flee.
This quote presents us a different meaning of bravery, where this word is not how much you can fight or how many enemies you can kill for your country, but how much strength and courage you have for following your dreams and going against the "fear of embarrassment."

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1). "This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife." (pg. 39) From the first sentence of this chapter a confessionary tone is set.

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Courage
Vietnam war
Physical and emotional burdens
Memory
The subjection of the truth to storytelling
Secret
The pointlessness of the war
Fear of shame in the war

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'You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think. this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing squeal pigs. That kind of boredom' --- O'BRIEN
'One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.' --- AZAR
'On some occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.' ---O'BRIEN
'The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repeating itself over and over.' --- O'BRIEN
'I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy.' --- AZAR

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Jimmy Cross - Commander of the Platoon
Tim O'Brien

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Love
Friendship
War
Sadness

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They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die

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-Vietnam War
-Unrequited Love
- Death
-Emotional and physical burden
-Desperation
-Fear
-Hopefulness

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- Sad sarcasm and humor

- Looking at the Brightside /Different Perspective

- Nostalgy

- Harsh reality of war