Reality vs. Fiction: How To Tell a True War Story

One chapter entirely dedicated to the notion of truth is "How To Tell a True War Story" which covers the death of O'Brien's friend Curt Lemon, as well as a story that another platoon mate, Mitch Sanders, tells O'Brien.

Let's start with the death of Curt Lemon.

Lemon is only introduced momentarily in the begging of the story as "the dead guy". There is initially no real explanation of how he died until several chapters later. O'Brien prefaces the story of Lemon's death by telling us that what we are about to read is exactly true, but contradicts himself several pages later noting that he has told the story of Curt Lemon's death "many times, many ways." Again, O'Brien is really driving home his message that truth is a sensation and not an event.

Lemon dies, according to O'Brien, by tripping a landmine while playing catch with a grenade with another soldier, Rat Kiley. Lemon's death is detailed in aftermath, with gruesome description of pulling his remains out of the tree he was blown into, but O'Brien remains fairly ambiguous about how exactly Lemon tripped a booby trap, saying only that he heard an explosion and saw Lemon "consumed by light."

O'Brien's pattern of unreliable narration and lack of detail leads us to question, did Lemon really step on a mine, or did the grenade that he and Rat Kiley were playing catch with accidentally detonate? What version of the truth are we getting here, "happening truth" or "story truth"?

Then there's Mitch Sander's story to Tim.

Sander tells fictional Tim about a couple soldiers on a stealth mission up in the mountains. Their job was to camp out for 7 days and 7 nights and report back anything they saw or heard. On the fourth night, the soldiers heard signing from the jungle. They heard an entire orchestra of mama-sans and papa-sans, a glee club, too. The noise was inescapable and maddening, so the soldiers called in for backup and they decimate the jungle - no mama-sans found, no orchestra, no glee club. But Sanders insists that they were there. 

A couple nights later, Mitch tells Tim there was no orchestra. No glee club, either. But even though the story was fabricated, he insists that it was still true. How? The soldiers went a little nutty up there on the mountains alone and started hearing things. They really, truly believed that there was an orchestra and a glee club. In response to stress, fear and lonliness, their mines fabricated the entire event - a delusion. But even though they heard this music in a state of delusion, they still heard it. The glee club may have been in their heads and not in the jungle, but it was still somewhere, and to them, it was real.