How To Tell A True War Story Summary

The language of war is different for everyone. It greatly affects how your audience perceives war and its meaning. Using particular words to derive the meaning from the truth, can usually manipulate the reader from seeing the actual truth. The author talks to the audience in a way that connects with them through the words and stories told in these essays. The use of diction has the power to persuade the audience to a specific side of believability. In How to Tell A True War Story Tim O’Brien goes on about all the indications of what a true war story is. “Its difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” When Lemon got blown up it seemed that he was lifted up by the sunlight and was carried up into the trees full of moss and white blossoms. In reality he had just gotten blown up all over the trees. When retelling the story, they way you tell it will be different and the words you choose to tell in the story can manipulate the listener’s impression of the story. In A Mystery of Heroism Collins is sent out to get some water over at a well and on his way back, he sees a man on the ground who asks him for water. At first Collins doesn't know what to do so he walks away but rushes back to give him some water. Collins really doesn’t think
that he could ever be a hero because he is flawed. By going back and giving that man the water shows how much of a hero he really is. Does it actually matter why though? I doesn’t matter why. It doesn’t matter why Collins went to get the water for the group. It doesn’t matter why you tell a war story the right way or a different way than it happened. _____. In the poem The Man He Killed when this man talks about war it is all just something they have to do and have done forever. It is implied in war that you kill and that’s that.
“I shot him dead because -- because he was my foe, just so: my foe of course he was; thats clear enough although” He killed this man because thats what he was sent out to do. To Thomas Hardy war is curious and quaint. To Barbara Ehrenreich war is complex, The Roots Of War. “But war is too complex and collective an activity to be accounted for by any warlike instinct.” the instinct of war is to kill. Instinct may or may not motivate a man to shoot the first enemy he comes into contact with in battle. They don't think about it, they just go for it. The Purpose of the author choosing this diction to talk about war and how these men fight is because it sets the mood for the reader. The reader is getting a glimpse of what it is like to be out on that battlefield and they are getting all aspects of it, even the sides that aren’t so great, like killing a man just because we say that they are the enemy. ___. In Refresh, Refresh this quote really stands out with word choice and descriptiveness, “ We got on our bikes and we drove to Bend and we drove so fast I imagined catching fire like a meteor, burning up in a flash, howling as my heat consumed me, as we made our way to the U.S.
Marine Recruiting Office where we would at last answer the fierce alarm of war and put our pens to paper and make our fathers proud.” This quote really captures the audience’s attention. The word choice and hyperboles that he used makes you feel like you are there in the moment with him. He is being a hero by making his father proud and by the end of this story you feel for his loss and that is what this empirical imagery does to the
audience. War has been around since the beginning of time, and since then war has gotten bigger and more grisly. After these wars men, and now women, come home to their families and tell them their war stories. Though half of these stories may not be true, we listen to them and sometimes even believe them. Our perception of war gets alterd very easily, especially in the way someone tells their story to us. The diction these people use does persuade our thoughts on the believability of the story, but really the diction used towards their audience alters their attitude towards the subject. And that’s how we let ourselves believe that the man actually got carried up into those trees full of moss and white blossoms.