The Fog of War

Already in the first chapter, Mitchell Sanders offers elusive "morals" in the stories he tells - morals often lost to his comrades. Perhaps this is by design, the real moral weight of these stores being too abstract and intangible to effectively rest upon the spoken word. The word "moral" connotes an ethical worth to the story, and therefore  an ethical to the war itself, from which the story springs. Sanders's tales, which unravel into labyrinthine narratives with no coherent endings, contrarily suggest an absence of such worth. Henry Dobbins presses the point early on: "I don't see no moral," to which Sanders cryptically responds, "There it is, mate" (O'Brien 13).

Out of his earnest nebulousness, Sanders implies an amorality about the war, the soldiers, and the stories they tell. In "How to Tell a True War Story," O'Brien comments on this explicitly. "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done" (65). Rather, O'Brien and his comrades trade their tales of experience, grasping if not for a moral, then at least for a conclusion or some amount of coherence. What they divine, however, is at best elusive, akin to the mountain fog that swallowed Sanders's storied six-man patrol. Another familiar theme. The only certainty in wartime is chaos.

This chapter reflects that total uncertainty in its literary construction. O'Brien spirals around the story of Lemon's death with determined non-linearity. His style is conversational, vulnerable to tangents, and epitomizes the very aspects of a war story that the chapter seeks to comment on. It is amoral, without certain conclusion, desperate to divine its own coherence. Just as he wakes up from dreams in the middle of the night with the elusive meaning of a dream almost in reach, this chapter's meaning tantalizes O'Brien, his listeners, and his reader.

But just as with Dobbins, the subtlety of its unspoken message is lost upon the teary-eyed woman who hears it. What she hears is a story of the cruelty of war. The hapless water buffalo, a tragic icon of frantic and senseless violence. But in fact, despite the raw violence and gore, the woman fails to understand that this is not a war story. In what seems to come to O'Brien only by the end, like a sobering lifting of the fog, is that this is a love story. This chapter, therefore, might well represent a charge to the reader, to understand the elusive meaning of his word, despite its apparent but misleading focus.