About a War Story The short story “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy” is about a new soldier in the Vietnam War. The author Tim O’Brien was a soldier in the Vietnam War and now he writes war stories. In his story, he tries to get you to understand different things about war. One of thing he wants you to know about war is what it's really like. Another of the things he tries to show you in his story is what it was like being there during the war. Another thing he shows in his story is that soldiers are afraid too. These are a few of the things that Tim O’Brien tells you about war in the short story “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy”. War is very painful. In his story, the soldiers were drinking Coca Cola that afternoon, not knowing that later that day one of them would die. The main …show more content…
Throughout the short story he explains the smells and all of the conditions while they were there. He tries to show us as accurately as he can so that we can understand what it would have been like if we were there. “[...] his boots sank into the thick paddy water, and he smelled it all around him. He would tell his mother how it smelled: mud and algae and cattle manure and chlorophyll; decay, breeding mosquitoes and leeches as big as mice; the fecund warmth of the paddy waters rising up to his cut knee” (O’Brien 198). This is a reason why he writes war stories. During his story, he also explains how soldiers are afraid too. In the book, Peter Berlin gets so afraid that he starts giggling and laughing to keep from crying or showing how afraid he really is. He is scared from watching one of his fellow soldiers step on a landmine and then dying of a heart attack a little while later. “He could not remember what they said to do to stop being afraid; they hadn’t given any lessons in courage [...]” (O’Brien 200). This is another way Tim O’Brien shows that during war, even soldiers are