2.+Group+Passage+1

How to tell a True War Story By Tim O'Brien (Paradox)  How do you generalize?    War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; makes you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not. Analysis  The theme of How To Tell a True War Story by Tim O'Brien is that war is irrational and the emotions that come with war can never be described in words. T h  e paradox found was used to reinforce the contradiction and confusion of what war is. Members of the war experience several emotions during and after their time at war. War evokes several unexplained emotions due to all of the positive and negative encounters that take place. Such as the gaining of comradeship, respect, and knowledge. On the contrary they are also presented with the deaths of their fellow comrades, destruction, and several even experience major trauma. When a person is explaining their war story they use different paradoxes because they get caught up in their own emotions and end up thinking irrationally, making them not able to express the truth in war. O'Brien describes war as being any and every emotion possible. All those feelings that built inside a soldier during war are unexplainable that is the reason why war stories sometimes don't make any sense and often times are not fully true. The irrationality of war confuses the soldiers about the event that occurred. When O'Brien says "war makes you dead" he means that war kills the soldiers rationality which causes them to believe they saw something when in reality they didn't. Overall, the paradox found in this story explains the different emotions that our caused when experiencing war.