In my Comp 2 college class I sometimes teach a short story about the Vietnam war called "The Things They Carried" by Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien. It is a masterpiece that horrifies with its lists of the physical and emotional baggage borne by our soldiers in the jungle.

I often ask my students to write about it considering something O'Brien wrote elsewhere: "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human 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. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."

O'Brien's writing fascinates me, particularly because he lived that war. It gives his work so much more authority than other writers, politicians, or speech makers who haven't paid such a price. The quote about a........

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