Forrrrrrrr sho

This section starts out with a story about Curt Lemon.  He is a man who actually enjoys combat and fighting in the war.  O’Brien tells this story from after Lemon’s death, and describes his feelings toward Lemon’s not being around anymore as, “hard to mourn.”  The other chapter in the selected reading is a story about Rat Kiley, who tends to greatly overexagerate everything he says.  All of his stories are out of proportion taking us back to a main philosophical question of the book, how can you tell if a story is true?

Though a bit rediculous, this story about Fossie and Mary-Anne is very entertaining.  Although it was probably impossible and probably illegal to bring in a girlfriend to your military base in a helicopter, it did happen to the story.  Was this story real?  Did it really happen?  I think that because of Kiler’s reputation its easy to say that, yes this story is made up, or at the very least, incredibly exagerated.  But this raises another issue to finding out the truth of stories… how much someone’s reputation can change people’s opinions of what is the truth.  For example, if someone else had recounted this story that didn’t have a known history of exageration, would it have been considered true?