“Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

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O’Brien the narrator briefly turns into O’Brien the person in the beginning of the story saying “This is true.”
Rat Kiley, the team medic then begins a tale about how he wrote a letter home to the sister of a fellow soldier after that soldier was killed.
The letter is filled with details about what a great soldier this guy was, how he was always ready to help the team by taking difficult assignments
He speaks of how this guy once went fishing with a stack of grenades and once even went trick or treating naked in a local village. Rat chokes himself up while writing this letter intending to humanize his friend

Rat mails the letter and waits two months,
“the coose never writes back”

 “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. ”

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Curt Lemon was the guy Rat Kiley was talking about in his later to the “Coose”
Curt and Rat Kiley were playing a game of “Hot potato” with a smoke grenade
Kiley describes how Lemon stepped into a patch of sunlight and onto a IED (Improvised Explosive Device)
He is lifted high into a large tree
O’Brien writes that when such thinks happen your memory of the event tends to get scrambled. You know you saw it but your mind tricks you into believing it was untrue.

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Sanders talks about how a group of 6 highly qualified troops are charged with hiking up a mountain and, in silence, spying on a village below
They are merely there to listen and are under strict orders not to talk-as they may compromise their position
After a few days of silence the 6 men are so attuned to the jungle around them that they begin to hear things…
They start to make out a concert going on with chimes and xylophones-despite the fact that they are deep in the woods and there is no possibility that this could be happening.

“The next part you won’t believe’
“Probably not”
“You won’t. And you know why?
Because it happened. Because every word is dead-on true”
-Conversation between Sanders and O’Brien

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Eventually they begin to hear voices. They believe they are listening to a cocktail party with popping champagne corks, martini glasses clnking and laughing.
Then, the whole country seems to be communicating around them. The monkeys, the mountains, the trees… Vietnam seems to come ALIVE.
The men are so scared they call in all the air cavalry they can. They make the mountain burn. They drop fire on the trees, the animals, and the imagined cocktail party
Eventually, they are asked by a colonel what they heard on the mountain… After all, they just dropped millions of dollars worth of bombs on it! The men say nothing. They merely salute the general and walk away.

 Sanders asks O’Brien what the moral is-O’Brien has no answer. “Hear that quiet man? Just listen. That’s your moral.”
 A True war story something you feel in your gut-there is no moral…

 O’Brien elaborates on Lemon’s death
First he was laughing and talking, then we was dead.
Rat Kiley later tracks a baby water buffalo into a deserted village and tortures it by shooting in non-lethally.
Finally, O’Brien relates the story of having to peel Lemon out of the tree. He graphically describes the way the skin hung from the branches. Organs and bones hung from every limb. He confesses that that image has stayed with him.

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Everyone has heard about the four guys who are walking down the trail when a grenade is tossed their way. The one guy jumps on it in order to save the lives of his friends.
The person listening responds “Is it true?”
It’s just as true as the same thing happening but all four guys are blown up anyway. As he’s about to die , one of the soldiers might ask the guy who jumped on the grenade “why did you do that?”
“Story of my life” Responds the first soldier
They all die

“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 the 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