Live with insanity or lose your life in Death?

I am probably a little slower than most of you, but I finally understand for myself why it doesn't matter if the stories are true. The characters need to be, and that's why stories are told. At the beginning of the last chapter O'Brien writes "They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." Through out this book and the diverse stories you relate to a character or two.

I, in a way, developed my own since of relationship with Rat Kiley and Kiowa. They fascinated me and I wanted to keep reading the book just to see what happened to them. I almost wanted to skip all the other stories told just to sit at there feet and listen to them tell stories. It was like I was in Nam, in the dark sitting around Rats hole as he told his tail of Mary Anne Bell. I reacted to it in the same way the others did in the story. I was scared and horrified me. I couldn't believe it, and I could here Rat's sighs begging for us to believe his tale, however tall it may have been.

It is hard for me to choose between Kiowa's horrific death and Rat Kiley's mind going. I really enjoyed Kiowa's strait-forwardness and connected with him as you learned more about his character and I felt the respect for him that the other men did. In the story Church when Dobbins recognises the things that Kiowa did differently from the rest of them, there was a feeling of respect and small amount of envy, I felt. It was hard for me to 'watch' his death happen as I read the words and finally discovered his fatal end. In all honesty his death was gruesome, but he didn't have to suffer after that. He's dead and I choose to believe his soul is in a better place.

Rat Kiley's story on the other had brings sorrow into my heart. Thinking of how a great strong and smart mind was tainted by the things he'd been treating through out the war. I find it a form of humor and terror that in the beginning of the book O'Brien says that no one would blame him for shooting his own foot just to get out of the war and go home..... then Rat actually acts upon that jester because he can't handle the hallucinations in his head. To live with the knowledge and memories of the 'normal' life you lived before and be able to go back to that sanity would bother me to no end. As a reader I don't know if that makes me insensitive to death or overly sensitive to what tricks the mind can play. I also think that O'Brien put it in words better than I could, he said in the interview, "I was examining myself essentially, my own terror inside." That's what I felt as I read the account of Rat. My heart sank.