Tim O'Brien on true war stories

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behaviour, 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 had 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."


(From Tim O'Brien's 'How to Tell a True War Story', in War Stories (eds. Sebastian Faulks and Jörg Hensgen), 2014., London: Vintage, p. 351.)