A/N: I wrote this after reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. The repeated theme of the novel is that there is no such thing as a true war story. I got bored one day shortly after I finished the book and this came out.

Completed: 5-25-10

Posted: 7-5-10

A True War Story

There's no such thing as a true war story, not really. But then again, there's no such thing as a false one either.

War is a paradox. Millions of people die just so a million others don't have to. One side fights for all things moral and the other fights for all things right. God is on everyone's side until somebody wins the fight.

In war, everything is right and true, and everything is wrong and false. You just don't know anymore. Everything you see and touch you'd like to think is real, but this isn't you seeing or touching, it's someone else. Someone you don't recognize.

You left yourself behind the moment you signed your name on the dotted line. You're not you and you isn't you, so what is real? What is true?

Nothing.

And yet, how can everything that that someone else saw and did not be real? It can't not be. You see them when you close your eyes. Not the people you've killed, but the people you've seen dead.

That's what hits you the hardest.

Death makes no distinction between the good and the bad.

Everybody dies.

In war, that's your job: eliminate the enemy. You may not like it, but you aren't you so you do it anyway. You can tell yourself the enemy isn't human, that it isn't like you. But then you pass a row of graves on the side of the road. They're only a row of crosses, but you see them. The crosses bear no names and it hits you.

In death, we're all the same.

You don't wonder how many graves you've made, because what's the point? They're dead.

They're dead.

That's all that matters now.

You've seen so many graves. How can those graves not be real?

There are other things too, things you can't tell anyone because who could understand? Hell, you don't even understand. The memories are seared onto your brain, burning, tearing, rotting, but they don't make any sense. You're floating above it all, detached, and yet a part of everything. Everything is wrong, distorted somehow. You aren't you and you isn't you. Nothing is real; it's too real. These memories—if you can call them that—have been a part of you for so long that you can't tell anymore the truth from the fiction.

And it doesn't matter because there's no such thing as a true war story.