Read this excerpt about the Vietnam War from Tim O'Brien's "Good Form": I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why s
tory-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. . . . I killed him. What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. "Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say, "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say, honestly, "Of course not." Or I can say, honestly, "Yes." How does the author's specific word choice and stylistic devi
The author’s wordings in the excerpt describe how his
experience was during the Vietnam war, he was young but was afraid to face
reality that his fellow comrades were dying in front of him. He describes how
in stories people can be able to twist what had happened to them, on the other
hand you could honestly tell them the true events that had happened.
