2/23/05

Telling a War Story

With the twentieth century came many wars and thousands of books about them. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo and The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien were two of the finest war novels ever written. They stem from The United States most infamous conflict, the Vietnam War. Some of the difficulties they encounter in releasing a true war story are memory loss, the physical and mental caliber of the events, the burying of traumatic experiences, and the demoralization inflicted by the war. However, both of them pass sharing a war experience in flying colors with different styles of powerful rhetoric.

One of the obvious problems for veterans in telling a war story is memory loss. In many places O'Brien and Caputo differ in the way they deal with this. O'Brien confronts certain times as if they were in a purple...