So Have You Decided Yet? What is a True War Story? Here is more Info on my Opinion Using O'Briens Book

A true war story also raises questions that have no answers. It always contains a certain type of mystery in it. Its careful reading can not lead to connecting all of its points. In the story of the water buffalo above, is it possible to say why Kiley really attacked the animal? We might guess that he was feeling frustrated and was taking revenge on the animal for Lemon’s death. We can never know, though. Perhaps, he did it because he liked torturing animals or maybe he just did it for fun. In the story of Lemon’s death above, can we know why Jensen was singing “Lemon Tree” while peeling away Curt Lemon’s remains from the tree. Perhaps, he found it ironic. Perhaps, he liked singing that song. In fact, all stories raise questions that sometimes have no answers, but a true war story raises questions that “hit you” even “until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up” and think you have figured it out. But, you have not. It just raises more questions. “You close your eyes ….and think…what’s the point?”.

Last of all, that one thing which really allows a story to bring us into the realm of a true war story is that a true war story is never actually about war. It is about love, about pain, about guilt, about revenge, about sorrow, and about anger. War is present in the stories above, but the war is more of a setting and less of an event. It serves as a background to these stories but is not what these stories deal with. They deal with loss, with anger, with irony, and with revenge. "A true war story can be about anything except war".
To better understand this, let us consider the story of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (pgs 89- 116). A young soldier by the name of Mark Fossie had his girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, brought to the hospital where he was stationed. Mary Anne was a young and beautiful blond, a typical all-American cheerleader type when she arrived. However, she was very adaptive to her surroundings. It was not long before she had learnt much of local Vietnamese culture and even general military practices. Eventually, she started acting like a soldier: she stopped wearing cosmetics and jewelry and took little care with her hygiene. She was a very different person now, with a voice that was all too new for Fossie. Then, she began returning to her shared quarters with Fossie very late at night and then not at all. Later, it was revealed that she was spending time with a small detachment of Green Berets stationed at the same location. She was going out on “hunts” with them and was learning to kill people. She liked it. In the end, she joined the wild and became a deadly shadow in the Vietnamese woods. She embraced her joy of killing; she was no longer that innocent girl she used to be.