trying to interpret pg. 38

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now," O'Brien says. Even though history says that the Vietnam War is over, O'Brien's story causes it to rehappen each time it is read, there is a transcendence of time. When I read the stories, I was caught up in the moment, of what was happening to the soldiers, and those experiences were being played out as I read. The events that O'Brien writes about may have happened along time ago, but when I read them the soldiers were alive and young again, reliving those events. The distance of time doesn't matter. The stories join the "past to the future" as O'Brien says.

What O'Brien says about stories on pg. 38 is significant. I believe stories are away that we identify ourselves, explain who we are. Whenever we relate an experiene to someone else it always takes the form of a story, which we may even embellish a bit if our memory is inexact. We want the reciever of the story to feel and understand the way we felt as we went through a particular event. Kind of like what Kiowa does when he keeps talking about the way Ted Lavender died. Kiowa just wants someone else to understand that arbitrary split second that is between life and death. Stories allow us to experience emotions or events that we normally might not experience.

Stories are the things that remain. There is no one alive that can remember the siege of Troy, but we have some good stories about it. Whether the story is true or not doesn't matter. Only the story matters. O'Brien says it better,"Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."