When Gene Lyons from Entertainment Weekly says that O'Brien aims to give a more 'human' understanding of war to his readers, she simply means this: instead of saying 'war is bad'--an idea that most everybody agrees with--he tells you a story and then tells you about what it means and why it proves that war is bad. He also uses the same process, but to an opposite end: he means to illustrate how war can be 'beautiful.' Putting these two concepts together gives the reader a complete understanding of the war from O'Brien's perspective.
	An example of a 'bad' war story would be the one regarding Ted Lavender and his death. Obviously, the fact that he died is sad and in and of itself proves that war is often pointless (especially the Vietnam war). However, you have to look at Ted Lavender as a person in order to fully realize the main idea behind the story. Mostly what I saw when I read about Lavender is that the man was so afraid and so screwed up that he was addicted to tranquilizers. The man couldn't help himself. And even though he tried to escape the war with drugs, tried to mellow out himself and his reality, he still became the victim of a claymore. It just goes to so: death is arbitrary. You could be a good man, a good soldier, husband, brother, son, whatever, and you could still get your butt kicked by a claymore or an M-16 or a serrated knife.
	On the other end of the spectrum, you have stories about how war can enlighten people. Take, for example, the story in the chapter titled 'Style.' At first glance, it's hard to see what makes this a 'good' story. All you really have is a girl whose family got killed and whose entire village was destroyed, and there she is doing some kind of mesmerizing little dance, half in a daze, celebrating God-knows-what.
But you have to dig deeper. You have to see that Henry Dobbins, the big man who is wise, but not necessarily intelligent, notices something in the girl. When Azar asked why the girl was dancing, Dobbins reply was that it didn't matter she just was. Later, when Azar begins mimicking the girl's dance with some erotic hip motion, Dobbins tells him that if he's going to dance, he better dance right, lest he find himself in the bottom of a well. The point of this story is to illustrate that soldiers aren't brutes, and most don't enjoy doing what they have to do. To even ask the question of why the girl was dancing is stupid; the only thing to know is that she was, and it was important to Henry.
	I suppose that good may not be the correct adjective for the above referenced story. Maybe I should call it a moral story, even though O'Brien says there is no such thing. While he is an excellent writer, I believe that he contradicts himself often throughout his book, as mentioned above.