What is a true war story?

To illustrate points of war in the book
"The Things They Carry" the story of Rat Kiley and the baby water buffalo can be considered. After Lemon’s death, the troops were marched into the mountains where they found and captured a baby water buffalo. After they had set up camp in a deserted village, Kiley attempted to feed the animal though it did not eat. Unexpectedly, he then shot the baby water buffalo in the knee. He continued to shoot the animal in virtually every spot, to torture the animal and make it feel pain. He shot it again and again. Eventually, he started crying and moved away. This story expresses astonishing and somewhat disturbing detail. The question to be asked here, which all readers will probably ask themselves, is whether this really happened at all. Is this war story true?
Maybe some of it is true or maybe none of it. It is practically impossible to know; even if it is true , even if it was, its truth would still be questioned. People would still not believe all of it: that a normal American soldier, a representative of the United States and a typical generalization of its culture, would torture an innocent animal. Furthermore, it is harder to believe the animal was “still alive, though just barely” after it all.
Another example of this is in the story of Curt Lemon’s death. O’Brien describes it with amazing specifications. “His face was brown and shining… Sharp gray eyes…the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms”. The diction and imagery is truly amazing, considering that all this took a mere split second to occur. O’Brien himself admits that when things like this happen, one tends to miss most of the detail; “the pictures get jumbled”. Thus, the mind fills in the blanks to make it look like what seemed to happen to him. The more one thinks about it, the more the actual sight is altered to fit of what would have been likly to happen, which is actually the “exact truth as it seemed”. The fact is that there are always things taken out and extra things put in a story; some things are overstated and some understated- that is what makes it a believable and personal story.
Often, “a true war story can not be believed” . It seems too unreal to be true; though, this is the kind of story that would actually be true. Some war stories like the ones previously mentioned can not be taken into consideration. They can not logically be believed to be true, yet one can believe that they are true. This is an important to realize that A true war story does not have to be true as long as it is believed. A completely untrue story could be a true war story; a completely factual war story could not be thought to be a untrue war story, simply because of its truth- which as O’Brien said “are contradictory”. Therefore, the best kind of war story contains a mix of the two entangled in such a way that it is impossible to tell the beginning of truth and the ending of the story. This deliberate unclearness makes that story a true war story. Why? Because it can be believed through empathizing with it and understanding the soldiers and their experience as they felt it, which is never exactly as it actually happened. In this way, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth”.