Exposing the Truth in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"Dear Mom and Dad, the war that took my life and thousands of others before me, is immoral, illegal and an atrocity” (letter from an anonymous soldier quoted in Fussell 653). Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam War veteran, had experiences similar to those of the soldier above. Even though O'Brien did not die, the war still took his life because a part of him would never be the same. Even in 1995, almost thirty years after the war, O'Brien wrote: " Last night I was thinking about suicide. You idiot computer and trying to wrap words around some horrible truths” (Vietnam 560). Vietnam and he uses his writing to help him deal with his conflicts To cope with war or other traumatic experiences, sometimes you just have to relive those experiences over and over again. This is what O’Brien does with his writing; he expresses his emotional truths even if it means he has to change the facts from 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 they could have actually happened. For example, “[a] colonel wanted the cut hearts of dead Vietcong to feed to his dog...The ears were strung together like pearls. Parts of Vietnamese bodies were kept as trophies; skulls were a favorite... The Twenty-fifth Infantry Division left a "calling card", a shoulder patch torn from the division emblem, stuffed into the mouths of the Vietnamese it killed » (Fussell 655). Even though we don't want to believe these things because they seem too atrocious, the soldiers...... middle of paper ......e who sent the soldiers to war are just as responsible as the soldiers of any act of war they have committed. Works Cited Fussell, Paul. "Vietnam". The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern Warfare. Ed. Paul Fussel. London: Scribners, 1991. 651-6. O'Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” Write like Re-Vision. Ed. Beth Alvarado and Barbara Cully. Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishing, 1996. 550-8.__________. At Lake of the Woods. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.__________. “The life of the dead”. The things they carried. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. 255-273.__________. “Vietnam in me.” Write like 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, CT: Praeger, 1992. 125-43.