Sense of Truth Itself

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing much is ever very true."

Dealing with trauma can cause individuals to use disassociation as a mean of painting the trauma as insignificant. Trauma can also lead to the victims developing PTSD.  As a result of disassociation, it is difficult to determine what is actually a memory or the re-imaginings of the trauma to the victim. Trauma victims can use amnesia as a coping mechanism to forget the act of trauma itself or to make it seem as if it had happened to someone else in a different lifetime. As a result of disassociation, individuals develop the incapability to distinguish between the true recollection of the trauma and the "storied" version of the memories.

 As Tim O'Brien stated, "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true story nothing much is ever very true". By writing that, I think he was letting the readers know that in general, when a  victim is retelling their memory of the trauma, it could necessarily not be 100% true as victims sometimes, without meaning to, tell their imagined memories as part of the true memories. Their memories were morphed as a way to separate/isolate the incident from their everyday life, so they could continue as if nothing happened.

This quote explains to me why his retelling of Curt Lemon's death varies each time. The first telling of the memory paints Lemon's death almost as if it was not real or that Lemon is not dead, only surrounded by sunlight that "lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms." The second retelling states facts without emotion, i.e. "on the third day, Curt Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round. He was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead". I would consider the third telling about the day of Lemon’s death as the true memory because of how he describes the scene without any romanticizing and how it affects even now in the present.