Tim O'Brien's true war story

At least once a year, I reread Tim O'Brien's How to Tell a True War Story. I read it when it was first published as a short story in Esquire magazine. I reread it every year because it is so beautiful and awful and, well, true.

I'm so tempted to copy the best paragraph for us here. It belongs to the ages every bit as much as Fitzgerald's rowing against the waves of time again and again or however it goes. But I don't want to spoil this beautiful prose for anyone, but I risk this much:

"It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do."

For a guy whose rivers and mountains have almost always been figurative, it makes me think I understand it. It makes me wonder, and inspect myself, and do the 'fearless moral inventory' and all and allows me to conclude whether, figurative or literal, I'm the sort of man who could 'march into the mountains and do things I'm afraid to do.'

I have my answer, but that's another ending I don't care to spoil.