NP? "A true war story is never moral"

[pynchonoid]

[...] "There are in this anthology a few pieces of
vivid prose by men who had firsthand knowledge of what
they wrote -- excerpts from Louis-Ferdinand Celine's
"Journey to the End of the Night," Heinrich Boll's
"The Silent Angel," James Jones's "The Thin Red Line"
and James Salter's "The Hunters," as well as Tim
O'Brien's short story "How to Tell a True War Story"
-- but these are the exceptions.

A possible explanation is suggested by O'Brien, who
served as an infantryman in Vietnam. "A true war story
is never moral," he says. "It does not instruct, nor
encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper
behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men
have always done. If a story seems moral, do not
believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel
uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of
rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste,
then you have been made the victim of a very old and
terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There
is no virtue."

For those who have undergone it, war is so immediate,
so ghastly and so implacably contradictory -- "It can
be argued . . . that war is grotesque," O'Brien
writes. "But in truth war is also beauty" -- that
frequently the instinct of those who have fought is to
suppress their memories rather than to rework them
into fiction or anything else. [...] 

from a review of:
_The Vintage Book of War Fiction_

in today's Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37847-2002Dec10.html


Enjoy!

-Doug



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