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In "The Things They Carried" towards the end of the chapter Lavender dies, while Cross was thinking about Martha. Cross later, and for the rest of his life blames himself for the death of Lavender. This death was a wake up call, a loss of innocence for Cross. After Lavender was sent off, Cross becomes someone else. He burns the photo of Martha, showing that he is letting go of her, and his past distractions. He then realizes that war is not a game and if he messes up people will die, this is shown in the book as he starts to command his platoon more. This incident was a

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"Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes him back." In the beginning of "How to Tell a True War Story" we read that Rat Kiley writes a letter to Curt's sister but she never replies. I think that this whole event, Curt stepping on a land mine and then the letter, is what causes Rat to lose his innocence.

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War had the ability to reap one of their innocence in an endless number of ways. After receiving his draft notice, O'Brien's entire life comes to a crashing halt. He hasn't yet entered war and he is already ruined by it. Instead of leading his normal, young-adult life, he finds himself having to accept the realities of the war. This single mandate takes him from an oblivious, outsider state to being just as scared and filled with shame as everyone else.

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In "On the Rainy River," O'Brien has a moral dilemma of whether or not he should leave to Canada or submit to war. He begins as this strong guy who has a possibility of leaving and escaping and he has a strong idea of it. When he finally gets to the Canadian border, he all of a sudden becomes scared and anxious of leaving because of the thought that he could get caught, be called a coward,  or leave his family and life behind. He eventually allows himself to submit into war and realizes that if he stays, there would/could be a better life ahead of him. "I saw faces from my distant past and distant future." (56) Here he literally has a hallucination of his distant future that hasn't even existed. He sees this and realizes that this would be the life if he hadn't left and all the possibilities.

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In Chapter 7, "How to tell a True War Story," O'Brien claims that a war story must include evil in it to be even closely legitimate.  He states, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (65). War stories are sometimes made interesting but do not have the entire truth. The only way that someone can understand the actions in war if some parts of it is made up.

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In "Enemies" and "Friends," Jensen and Strunk state that if either of them are severely injured to the point of disability from the war, the other one would kill them. This proves to be false when Strunk is injured by a mortar, cutting off one of his legs.“But you got to promise. Swear it to me--swear you won't kill me.”

Jensen nodded and said, “I swear...” (O’Brien 63). When put in the face of death from the war, Strunk wished for anything to continue his life. He ignored the previous deal he made with Jensen and decided that life was the better option any day, even though he died on his trip to the hospital.

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In "Enemies", Jensen is always in a state of paranoia. He is trapped between the war and his fight with Strunk. In the quote, "In any circumstances it might've ended there. But this was Vietnam, where guys carried guns, and Dave Jensen started to worry" (59-60). This quote shows how paranoia affected Jensen . Jensen was scared and on one side he was going through the difficulty of the war. On the other side, he was worried Strunk would get his revenge. To survive in the war, Jensen broke his own nose and made things right with Strunk.

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In "How To Tell a True War Story," O'Brien tells the story of how Curt Lemon died, by way of a booby trap in the woods. He talks about how he looked haloed in sunlight while it was happening, and how O'Brien looked away and looked back continuously. He tried explaining the way Lemon looked and how he felt and how Lemon must have felt while dying by using contradictory sentences. The overall use of this shows how war is a confusing muddle both during and after the war, and extracting the overall message of the war requires creating more muddles and often cannot be done in the best sense anyway.

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In "Spin", O'Brien's shows a disconnection with his memories, being unable to carry on with it. This disconnect is further worsened by the fact that "The thing about remembering is that you don't forget." (33). This shows the weight of memories that causes a blur between illusion and reality.

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In the passage "love" when the guy came home he found that martha never would love him but it was hardly a problem for him because he used it as more of a dream than something that would ever actually happen in his life, during the war it was a way of escape for him

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In "The Things They Carried" the men react to a firing that happened. O'Brien writes "They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic - absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices." From this it is clear that war creates a very routine life, and after traumatic experiences in Vietnam life begins to go very slowly, and it becomes very normal. The soldiers no longer feel the same emotion from death.

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In "Enemies", there are several traits that Jensen and Strunk develop as an effect of war but the most apparent is paranoia. For example after the two of them got into a physical altercation that there was this " silent tension" that resulted in Jensons' special precautions. While in civility there silent tension would have most likely been non-existent since there isn't this sense of death being a immediate consequence.

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In "Spin" a sense of illusion vs. reality is seen throught the stories told and the actions of the people in these stories. O'Brien strats the chapter by saying that war is not alway "terror and violence", but in the stories told even when there was someting "happy" there was something there that was the opposite. Also Lavendar would call the war mellow after taking too many tranquillizers even though. He has clouded his mind with a illusion that war is not as bad as it really is.

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In the chapter "Spin" it is very evident that the young men have already seen and done things that most wouldn't imagine dealing with their entirely life. In the quote following Azar blowing up Ted Lavender's dog the tragic truth "I'm just a boy." highlights the amount of innocence extinguished from the soldiers.

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In the chapter "How To Tell a True War Story", the Tim O'Brien states, "War is hell, but that's not that half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love." (76) To me, this quote represents the ambiguity of war. To most people outside of the battle lines, war is terrible - it represents death and sorrow. But in reality, as the author states, war also represents different layers, such as loyalty to their country, internal courage, and companionship.

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In "Friends", Strunk and Dave pass the stage of losing their innocence in war as when they made a pact to kill the other if they're crippled with the thought of nothing bad will happen to them when thats not the case. They assume that nothing bad could happen until Strunk loses his leg that they realize that they aren't safe.

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Stories and Writing is shown in the seventh chapter because O'Brien shows how a true war story is mostly never true because the story changes every time it is told. O'Brien's writing about a true war story shows how writings about war isn't about war, it has other meanings behind it.

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“‘Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today’” ( 32). This is from a memory of Ted Lavender and how some days were fun and lighthearted and how his tranquilizers would mask the terrible things going on in the war.

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"Love": "Later, when he took her hand, there was no pressure in return, and later still, when he told her that he still loved her, she kept walking and didn't answer and then after several minutes looked at her wrist watch and said it was getting late." (28)
This quote shows that Jimmy had felt that Martha loved him back. When he told her that he loved her, she rejected him. This shows the loss of innocence that Jimmy felt because no matter how hard he tried, Martha would not love him back.

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In "Love" 'Jimmy thinks that he is so in love with Martha who is just a girl who he barely knows. The illusion of his carries around the picture and and it helps him through the war as a distraction from what truly happens in war.

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In "Enemies," there is a powerful quote that references the effects war has on the soldiers. O'Brien tells us, "Because late that same night he borrowed a pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and used it like a hammer to break his own nose." This shows the paranoia and immense loss of logical thinking during war. Jensen thinks Strunk is going to get even with him and wants to call them equal. He goes upon himself, which is completely insane, and breaks his own nose. His own nose. The paranoia had driven him so insane he took drastic measures to ease his suspicion.

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In "Spin," is evident not only that war has effects, but long-lasting ones. Years after the war, both Cross and O'Brien delineate anecdotes that put them so close to the battle they were once in. The war lives on in their minds and within their trauma. It is explained that "the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now.” (O'Brien, 36) Maybe government documents called for a cease fire that ended the war, but it never actually ends for those that were once in the midst of it.

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In "Love", Cross is talking to Tim later on after the war. He discusses how it went when he went to talk to Martha again and he describes how Martha "didn't understand how men could do those things." page 28. This is after Cross talks about how he wanted to take action and try to get into a relationship with Martha, but she doesn't understand because she doesn't feel the same way that he does. That's because he has an illusion in his mind of Martha while Martha is in reality, where she doesn't love Cross. This leads to her giving him another picture of her because she does seem to understand how the illusion matters to him but she's still in reality and can't choose to love him because of that. Cross doesn't really come to terms with this because he doesn't love Martha he loves the idea of her, and that's why he asks Tim to try and make him sound good in his book in an effort to attract Martha. This scenario is about Cross' illusion meeting reality after the war and yet still stays in his mind.

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In "On the Rainy River" O'Brien talks about the smell of the pig blood that follows him everywhere. This was a symbol for the blood of all of the enemies that he killed in war following him even when the war ended. The effect of war of O'Brien caused him to carry the men of all of those whom he killed during the war.

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"Friends": "But you got to promise. Swear it to me-swear you won't kill me" (63). When the two of them made this promise, they were being childish and overconfident. They did not believe that anything horrible would ever happen to either of them.They did not take into account the weight of the deal. When they actually experienced a tragic event, the reality of the deal set in. Neither of them wanted to uphold the deal.

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In enemies we can see the psychological effects of the war on Dave's sanity, for example it's said that there was "No safe ground: enemies everywhere"

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In "How to Tell a True War Story", there was the following quote, "In war, you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true." (78). Tim suggests through this quote that war stories are not meant to display true facts, since the soldiers themselves don't even know the facts. They only the emotions they felt, and therefore the only important/true part of a war story is the emotion felt.

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In  "How to Tell a True War Story",  it states "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." (67).
O'Brien integrates illusion versus reality into the theme of stories and writing. He describes story telling as being more than just what is written on the page, and often how the story is told is not always the truth.

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In "Enemies" there is a quote stating that the distinction between good guys and bad guys had disappeared for him. This shows how the effect of war include a altered mental status. It becomes hard for one to see who is right and who is wrong as they all trained to just shoot, and kill, not to think. In chapter Jensen lost the distinction between good and bad, because he was unable to determine if Strunk was either a thief or telling the truth.

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In "How To Tell a True War Story," Tim O'Brien says that "In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical." (68). He explains that the contents in a real war story contains details that sounds out of the ordinary, like it couldn't have happened, but in reality it did. The reader has to have that mindset of whether or not that certain event really did happened.

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In the passage "How to tell a true war story" the guy nicknamed Rat has his best friends killed and his sister does not respond. These things in war caused the pain within him to build up to the point where he just shot the water buffalo until it was mangled with bullet holes

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In "How to Tell a True War Story" The loss of innocence is shown when Rat shoots the young buffalo many times even though it was already hurt. This can be seen as the loss of innocence because he was shooting his innocence away by shooting the baby buffalo.

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In "On the Rainy River," O'Brien faces the choice of serving his country or taking the "cowardly" way and abandoning America. O'Brien's loss of innocence is shown when he chooses to stay. “And right than I submitted.

I would go to war--I would kill and maybe die--because I was embarrassed not to.

That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow and the boat and cried” (O’Brien 57). O'Brien's sudden realization to do what is best even if it means he must face death shows the beginning of O'Brien's growth as a character.

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In "How To Tell a True War Story," O'Brien says, " A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (74). O'Brien talks about how the creation and presentation of a story leads to whether or not it is actually believed, and thereby true. He states that in order for a story to be true, it has to be able to speak directly to the reader. This can be seen when he also talks about the story of the water buffalo, which is sickening and grotesque all by itself. As it speaks directly to the reader, the essence of the story holds truth even if the events that transpired may not be true. Therefore, O'Brien shows through his writing the types of emotions and experience he and the soldiers had to face by telling of traumatic experiences.

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"Enemies": "Jensen couldn't relax. Like fighting two different wars, he said. No safe ground: enemies everywhere.  No front or rear." (60)
This quote shows the paranoia that fighting in a war could cause. Jensen felt that he could not even trust his friends. The war caused the men to feel that they were never safe, no matter where they went.

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In "How to Tell a True War Story," the baby buffalo symbolizes innocence. Rat completely destroys the buffalo. He shoots it all over inflicting more and more pain on it. Understanding the symbolism, Rat is destroying the innocence. He has lost it over the death of his best friend and destroys something that never deserved to be hurt.

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Towards the end of the chapter "The Things They Carried", Jimmy Cross comes to a realization that his feelings for Martha would never be reciprocated. The author states, "He was realistic about it. There was a new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but he hated her." (23) This quote shows the moment when Jimmy Cross realizes just how different his life is after joining the war. He is in Vietnam, fighting a war - Martha is at home in America. At this point in the chapter, it can be said that he "lost his innocence" of being naive about the situation.

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In "How to Tell a True War Story", there is a quote that states "There us no clarity... the old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true" which illustrates how war can impact people and the world with the stories that are told. It also brings up that now, stories don't go by rules and the so called "truth" might not actually be true.

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In "On the Rainy River", O"Brien suffers from a moral dilemma that causes him to try to flee. He states that "Intellect had come up against emotion...what it came down to was a sense of shame." (49). Through this, he conveys that through exposure to many different emotions, he had lost his purity and had became stained with guilt, thus losing his innocence .

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In the fourth chapter, "On the Rainy River," O'Brien is ambivalent when it comes to either escaping from the war or staying where he was originally at. Due to the moment of dilemma he suffered with, he saw many different illusory organic objects such as his future wife calling for him to stay and old friends calling for him to go to Canada. In reality, he would have never met the people he saw in the future if he would have traveled to Canada. This moment expresses both Illusion and reality.

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In "The things they carried" Jimmy Cross burns his pictures of Martha. This shows loss of innocence because he realizes that his life will not be the same, simple life he once had. He cannot go home and continue this life, because things will be different. He realizes that holding onto the idea of Martha is only bringing him down.

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“Jensen couldn’t relax. Like fighting two different wars, he said”  (60). This quote shows that soldiers suffered from psychological damages that made them distrustful of everything and everyone.

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In the first chapter, "The Things They Carried," Jimmy Cross blames himself for Ted Lavender's death. The quote "He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead..."(16). Jimmy Cross is trapped in a mental world that keeps his mind away from the war. Jimmy Cross is aware that the thoughts he has reminiscing  about his home and Martha causes issues within the reality of war itself. He realizes this and blames himself for the deaths of Ted Lavender.

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In "Spin" the quote "On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. you could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance." Which shows how the truth it relative

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"Enemies": "Strunk's nose made a sharp snapping sound, like a firecracker, but even then Jensen kept hitting him" (59). This shows that in war there are limits. In a normal situation, the fight probably would not have escalated to the level that it did. However, at war there are no consequences for actions such as breaking the nose of a comrade. Acting violently has become a norm in the lives of these soldiers and no one reacts to these fights.

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"Dave Jensen an Lee Strunk did not become instant buddies, but they did learn to trust each other." (62) War puts a very heavy weight on people but at the end of the day there are your friends and there are your enemies. After this big fallout between these two men they are still on the same side. War really bonds people because it is literally life or death

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Jimmy Cross in the first chapter "The Things They Carried" is stuck in a trance like state by the thought of Martha at the same moment Ted Lavender. This association with Martha and the death of his own man shows how much his coping method with the war can cost. At the same time he undergoes an unimaginable amount of guilt which creates a mental conflict with lust and war.

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In "Enemies" the quote "in any other circumstance it might have ended there"(59) shows how violent people get in war. Even if the men are on the same side they all have a need to hurt someone, because now it's an instinct. Jensen can't even trust his own friends, so he breaks someones nose.

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In "Enemies" Dave goes crazy after a fight with Lee. Dave then shoots his gun into the air and then breaks his own nose. the war has affected Dave's sense of how to react in different situations. Lee could see it. the war caused them to react outside of their normal morals and do things that they normally would not.

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"How to Tell a True War story" is where O'brien gives us this contrasting view on storytelling about war and the power of fictional stories. For example, when he talks about " surreal seemingness" he is telling us as readers that some times the truth isn't always things that happened. This idea that even though a story about war may be completely false it could still represent something bigger or serve as a diluted version of their experience to make it believable enough for the readers.

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In "Enemies", O'Brien writes "Jensen couldn't relax. Like fighting two different wars, he said" (60).
Here, Tim O'Brien shows the effect on the human brain when a man is at war. Jensen is "fighting" inside his head as well as physically in the war. Because of this, he fights Lee Strunk out of spite and inflicts pain upon himself to make it "even" between him and Strunk.

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"Strunk frowned at the sky. He passed out again, then woke up and said 'Don't kill me.'" (63) This shows how even though Jensen and Strunk had a deal to kill each other, this was made in an illusive or hypothetical reality. Once Strunk was really mortally wounded, in reality, it was evident how he could not go through with this. Because of this Strunk begged Jensen not to kill him, because the reality of death was too much for him to bear.

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The loss of innocence can be seen very clearly in "How to Tell a True War Story", when Rat Kiley violently hurts a baby water buffalo. It is seen as piece of symbolism to him having lost his innocence, but having some remaining, represented by the water buffalo's ability to stay alive. Rat Kiley is killing his innocent past because of what he has experienced at war that has hurt him mentally.