“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you.”( 1) ![]() Truth is what “makes the stomach believe,” he insisted. Of course, for O’Brien “truth” is different from “what happened.” Sometimes it is what seemed to happen, and sometimes it is something else again. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” “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,” O’Brien wrote. ![]() He argued his point with powder-dry prose and the fierce moral clarity of someone who had picked his way through the jungles around Than Khe and Chu Lai. In 1990, Tim O’Brien reached deep into his knapsack of Vietnam horrors and came up with “How to Tell a True War Story,” a chapter from his book, The Things They Carried. The only problem with Band of Brothers-and it’s by no means an insignificant one-is that it’s not true. I’ve seen the whole thing twice now, and I cried at the end both times. ![]() Hailed by critics, it won a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Peabody Award. The production is based on the nonfiction bestseller by the late historian Stephen Ambrose and follows Easy Company of the highly decorated 101st Airborne from D-Day to the end of the war. I recently bought on DVD the 10-part miniseries Band of Brothers, which first aired on HBO in late 2001.
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