"You're never more alive than when you're almost dead"

O'Brien dedicated this entire chapter, like 16 pages, to the truth of a war story. He reiterated himself a lot, so I know that this truth thing must be a big deal for the upcoming chapters. I kept questioning him as I was reading. Why do you keep saying the same thing over and over? By the end of the chapter, I felt like he did at war: (not to the same extent, obviously) where "the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity" (page 78). O'Brien wants us to understand that the validity of the details of war stories are probably always going to be ambiguous and the response to most of them might just be an "oh", like he explained. But if you look past the war part of the story.. if that makes sense.. you can see something else. For instance, in that baby water buffalo story, who knows if any of that was true. What we do know now is that Rat Kiley loved Curt Lemon.

War stories aren't about war. They are about love, courage, grief, anger, friendship and other stuff like that. This kinda shines a new light on what I used to think of when I heard my Grandpa talk of war. I always expected to hear some sort of adventure hero story. And as a child, that is what I heard. But I'm sure now that as a "more mature child" I would gain something different from the story.. Well, I don't know. O'Brien makes it so confusing. He says that a true war story has no meaning, but then he kinda also says it does at the end. So who knows?