Wednesday, November 17, 2010

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.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Call of Duty. Best War Game



Call of Duty: World at War is a first-person shooter video game or a RPG role playing game. It is generally considered to be the fifth mainstream game of the Call of Duty series and returns the setting to World War II, after the storyline of the previous title, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was based in the present day.

The game begins in Makin Island at night on August 17, 1942. Private C. Miller watches the torture and execution of Private K. Pyle, a fellow Marine, by the Japanese. After breaking through the Japanese lines on the Peleliu beach, Miller destroys two Type 95 Ha-Go tanks with rocket strikes, allowing their tanks to advance. At the end of the mission, Sergeant Sullivan is killed by a Japanese soldier. Roebuck, now promoted to Sergeant, and his squad make their way through the Peleliu swamps to launch an assault on a Japanese held airfield to disable anti-aircraft guns. During the assault, Miller acquires a flamethrower and a bazooka.

The game then jumps to the Eastern Front on September 17, 1942 during the Battle of Stalingrad. Private Dimitri Petrenko regains consciousness in a fountain, just as German troops kill his comrades. When they leave, Dimitri meets Sergeant Reznov, another survivor, who tells him of his intention to kill General Heinrich Amsel, the man behind massacres all over Russia. After killing some German soldiers in their way, Dimitri follows Reznov through buildings and streets and they meet up with the remainder of Dimitri's unit, who are about to assault Amsel's communication post.
Dimitri is armed with a Mosin Nagant sniper rifle which originally belonged to Reznov, but his hands were horribly injured, quoting "you will snipe for me". Reznov then picks up a PPSH-41 submachine gun and then sets off to assassinate the German General. During the assault, Dimitri snipes Amsel. He and Reznov escape and jump into the Volga River. The following mission starts three years later, during the Battle of the Seelow Heights, near Berlin. Dimitri has been captured by German soldiers in an old barn. He is saved when the Red Army attack the barn. Among them is Sergeant Reznov and his subordinate, Private Chernov. Together, the Soviet troops advance through German lines and Dimitri aids them with a Panzerschreck until they reach a German camp.

It is by far the most popular game involving war fair. It depicts everything so greatly with such meaning. Get out there and buy it today if you already havn't.

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”.

The Things They Carried- by Tim O'Brien



Wars have always been fought, and different stories have always been told about them—some real, some fictional, some disturbing, and some inspiring. But, what is a true war story? Could it be any story about killing and conflict or does it have specific traits that define it as a unique story in its self. Tim O’Brien, in The Things They Carried, says that a true war story must be untrue, never-ending, sometimes about love, and should not even actually be about war. O’Brien emphasizes these elements in his novel because he wants to show us the psychological and sentimental aspects of being in a war, in this case the Vietnamese War.

In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien writes about the death of a young soldier, Curt Lemon. He steps on a loaded mine (specifically a “booby-trapped 105 round”) which detonates and blows him to pieces in front of his friends eyes. Curt Lemon had a best friend, whose name was Rat Kiley. Rat Kiley wrote a long, thoughtful, and sentimental letter to Lemon’s sister explaining how terrific Lemon was, the adventures the two of them had together, how Lemon’s death took place, and the tragedy that Lemon’s death really was to him. Lemon’s sister never replies to his heart felt letter. So, Rat Kiley calls her a “dumb cooze”, the worst possible term in his vocabulary. This really shows that a true war story is not moral. It does not justify actions by absolute morals; it does not attempt to show the right way or show us the wrong way. It simply states what happened. The story does not say that Lemon’s sister was wrong or Kiley was right in calling her that.
Perhaps, a better way to explain this can be found in the events immediately after Lemon’s death. Lemon’s remains were splattered across a tree. Dave Jensen and O’Brien had to climb and literally peel off Lemon’s remains from the tree. O’Brien remembers seeing “the white bone of an arm…pieces of skin…something wet and yellow that must have been intestines” . Yet, Jensen sings “Lemon Tree” as they throw down the parts. This demonstrates the meaninglessness of a war story. What moral or principle can be derived from it? None, whatsoever. After all, a true war story is just a story about ordinary human beings facing a war, which is reduced to nothing but survival for them. They have no great moral motive for going to war, and none keep them there. To them, war is a boring routine—with no more meaning than a job at Wendy's. This is why a war story must have no meaning, because the people to whom it is told must understand that the events are morally meaningless to the person experiencing them.