Exposing the Truth in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"Dear Mom and Dad: The war that took my life, and the lives of many thousands of others before me, it is immoral, illegal and an atrocity,” (letter from an anonymous soldier quoted in Fussell 653). Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam War veteran, had similar experiences to the soldier above. Even though O'Brien is not dead, the war still took his life because a part of him will never be the same again. Even in 1995, almost thirty years after the war, O'Brien wrote: "Last night I had suicide on my mind. Not if, but how. Tonight I will have it on my mind again... I am sitting in my underwear at this impassive stupid of a computer and tries to put some horrible truths into words" (Vietnam 560). I think O'Brien is still grieving what he experienced in Vietnam and uses his writing to help him deal with his conflicts. To deal with war or other traumatic experiences, sometimes you simply have to relive the experiences over and over again. This is what O'Brien does with his writing; expresses his emotional truths even if it means he has to change the facts of the literal truth. The literal truth, or some of the things that happen during the war, are so horrible that you don't want to believe that they could have actually happened. For example, "[a] colonel wanted hearts cut out of dead Viet Cong to feed to his dog... Ears were strung together like beads. Parts of Vietnamese bodies were kept as trophies; skulls were a favorite. .. The Twenty-fifth Infantry Division left a “calling card,” a torn shoulder patch of the division emblem, stuck in the mouths of the Vietnamese they killed,” (Fussell 655). Even if we don't want to believe these things because they seem too heinous, money...... middle of paper ......and who sent the soldiers to war are as responsible as the soldiers for any acts of war they committed . Works Cited Fussell, Paul. "Vietnam." The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern Warfare. Ed. Paolo Fussell. London: Scribners, 1991. 651-6.O'Brien, Tim. "How to tell a real war story." Writing as re-vision. Eds. Beth Alvarado and Barbara Cully. Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishing, 1996. 550-8._________. In the Lake of the Woods. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.__________. "The Lives of the Dead." The things they carried. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. 255-273.__________. "The Vietnam in me." Writing as re-vision. 559-571.Schroeder, Eric James. “Tim O’Brien: Maybe So.” Vietnam, We've All Been There: Interviews with American Writers. Ed. Eric James Schroeder. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992. 125-43.