Curt's Sacrifice

After the characters become prisms reflecting the light of veracity, the reader cannot help but believe that none of them deserve the grim fates that befell them. When Curt Lemon stepped on the rigged explosive round and subsequently died, O’Brien poetically described the event by writing, “Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms,” (O’Brien 67). Expectedly, though, it takes O’Brien less than fifteen pages to provide the reader with another description of the incident: “I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible,

More importantly than this, though, is the question of whether or not either character deserved to die. Even though Curt was known for his shenanigans, he was still a boy, he was still human. O’Brien describes Lemon as being ignorant of the danger of the war as a, saying, “Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn’t understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn’t know,” (O’Brien 66). Lemon was simply a boy thrown into a war that didn’t make sense; he didn’t deserve to die. Kiowa certainly did not deserve his grim fate either. This was the same Kiowa who understood O’Brien’s dismay at murdering a man: “Then after a long empty time he said, ‘Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you,’” (120). This was the same Kiowa who showed disdain upon the abuse of a sacred place of the Vietnamese: “‘Setting up here. Its wrong. I don’t care what, it’s still a church,” (116). For such a respectable man to die in a pile of shit is not fair in anyway at all. Only a depraved person would make the claim that Kiowa, Lemon, or any of O’Brien’s other deceased characters deserved their twisted

The author uses metafiction to acknowledge this line of questioning, even going as far as to involve an entire vignette, “How to Tell a True War Story,” in attempting to answer it. The veteran discusses with the reader the point of war as portrayed in real war stories. In short, the answer is that, quite simply, there is none. As O’Brien states, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done,” (65). He clearly sees no higher calling in the battlefield; it is dark, pointless, and barbaric. No, it is more than barbaric: it is an ancient, archaic, and even eldritch practice. It is the practice that all animals on our planet engage in: natural selection, the ultimate test of who can survive. Fictional O’Brien himself, at one point, sought to reject it upon partaking in it first hand, writing, “He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed. None of it mattered,” (127). Kiowa tells O’Brien that it is kill or be killed, and the fictional O’Brien shuts down and cannot grasp it. However, the metafictional O’Brien speaking with his reader knows that it is vulgar, it is violent, it is crude: “As