Growing up in a society that is so overwhelmed by the media culture, it isn’t surprising that we all have our own ideas about genres and the categorization of them. Regardless of how limited my knowledge on war movies is, there is still somewhat of a structure in my mind of how the story flows. O’Brien’s stories are undoubtedly stories about war seeing as how he fought in one and yet, his stories don’t fit the mold of the media. After countless movies and books about the subject of war, it’s hard to wrap your mind around the possibility that not all of these stories follow the same path. Spin, The Man I Killed, and Good Form certainly embody the common theme of death that is typical in most war movies, however from there, O’Brien’s stories depart from that of traditional war movies. By breaking away from the norm, O’Brien allows the audience to “derive pleasure from observing how the conventions of the genre are manipulated” (Chandler).

Contrary to what Hollywood has us believing, war isn’t all about jumping out of planes, gunfire, and crazy explosions. O’Brien shares the reality that there really isn’t all that much action going on and makes this clear when he states that “the war was nakedly and aggressively boring” (O’Brien 37). Instead of recalling life-altering, dangerous, action – packed stories from the battlefield, O’Brien mentions the people he met, the things they said to him, and the things they did to pass the time. As the audience, we expect our protagonist to uncover some hidden secret or plot and engage in a secret mission that ends with him saving the day because it is what we are use to but in actuality, these things didn’t always happen. In addition, the characters in O’Brien’s stories are worlds apart from the strong, heroic soldier who always knows what to do in every situation that we are used to seeing on the big screen. Instead, there are men like Azar who are not much older than high school children and are always messing around and playing practical jokes.

The Man I Killed goes into depths about the man that O’Brien has killed. There is no sense of patriotism in O’Brien’s tale, though a feeling of patriotism is usually prominent in a majority of war movies. In fact, O’Brien writes his account in a way that makes the audience sympathize with the Vietnamese man that he killed, who was considered the enemy. Wars in movies are usually depicted in a manner that makes the audience side with the American soldiers. The enemy side of the war is always portrayed as evil, and the American soldiers feel no hesitation in killing them because they deserve it. However, O’Brien has gone in the opposite direction because in this story, there is no black and white view of good and evil. O’Brien tells us the background story about this particular man that he killed, clearly making it seem as if this man was not an incredibly evil person and did not deserve to die at all. O’Brien’s inability to stop staring and his repetition of how the dead body looks shows that he feels remorse for killing this man, which one would never see in any other war movie/story.

Chandler’s belief that genres are useful in the sense that they “enable judgments to be made about the ‘reality status’ of the text (most fundamentally whether it is fictional or non-fictional)” is proven inaccurate by Good Form. Since this story is a war story and we know that O’Brien fought in the war, we automatically assume that all his stories are true. The way in which it is written and the subject of the story lead us to believe that they are real – I mean, who in the world would make up a story about killing someone? Nonetheless, O’Brien reveals that this tale along with almost the entirety of his book is fiction. O’Brien does, however, manage to break another one of our beliefs about war stories. To us, we might think that an absence of face means that there is an absence of guilt. That because soldiers kill so many people and do not differentiate between them, they are somehow off the hook when it comes to remorse. O’Brien sheds some light on this view through experience by stating, “twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (O’Brien 203).