The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. ~Tim O'Brien 
Read the following except from Philip Caputo's novel A Rumor of War, then consider the comments.
“So much was lost with you, so much talent and intelligence and decency. . . you embodied the best that was in us. You were a part of us, and a part of us died with you, the small part that was still young, that had not yet grown cynical, grown bitter and old with death. . . whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, nothing can diminish the rightness of what you tried to do . . . You were faithful. Your country is not . . . “As I write this, 11 years after your death, the country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse . . . But there are a few of us who do remember because of the small things that made us love you — your gestures, the words you spoke, and the way you looked. We loved you for what you were and what you stood for.”
Has this novel changed your impression of war? What will you remember most from reading it? Why is it that Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Bill Hagee, and others keep writing about it? What is it they want you to learn? Did you learn it? Were you listening?
And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross that river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow.It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. ~Tim O'Brien
