For this essay, I chose to react to passage 'B':
	
	“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things that men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

	I do not totally agree with O'Brien on this matter. I think that he is correct when he says the story itself is never moral, etc. However, I think that the whole point of a war story lies in its lack of virtue. It's kind of an example of what not to do. The story of Rat Kiley mutilating the water buffalo with his M-16 is an example of how someone shouldn't act.
	However, it also serves another purpose. It shows that events or actions that would normally not be permissible are often accepted in a war, because even though they are a gross violation of a normal man's moral code, those actions are the only things that keep the man sane. This, I believe, is an (and quite possibly the) essential theme of The Things They Carried: war changes people. War makes people do strange, irrational things, because war in and of itself is often irrational.