The War Genre

Since it had been a while since I'd watched the movies Platoon and Apocalypse now, I decided to refresh my memory by reading over the synopsis for each movie. Like a lot of movies that fall into the "war movie" genre, there are certain things that can be expected from films, or other such mediums, of that category. As is mentioned in the Chandler article, the section entitled "Working Within Genres", he states "...an advantage of genres is that they can rely on readers already having knowledge and expectations about works within a genre." So before reading the three short stories by Tim O'Brien, I expected there to be a certain type of dramatic elements placed in a violent scene. I expected the banter between allying soldiers as is seen in a lot of war films. Yet, when I finished Spin, I realized that these series of stories were certainly not what I expected based on my prior exposure to this genre. This came as a surprise to me but as O'Brien states in his article, "...pleasure is derived from 'repetition and different'; there would be no pleasure without difference." So as I might not have typically thought of a story such as this to be included with "war movies" or the war category in general, the difference to the repetition of the war genre these stories provide is deemed necessary.
The short story, "The Man I Killed" left a very big impression on me. Firstly, it was out of the norms which I had for a war story. Secondly, as I read more and more of the story, I felt the nostalgia or melancholy the character of might have felt (at first I thought it'd be O'Brien himself but as I later found out from "Good Form", it wasn't) from having killed the person. The attention to the detail of the Vietnamese that he killed immediately stuck out from the war stories I'd been used to since usually in war movies there might be a lot of killing of enemy troops with little to no moral repercussions (at least in the case of the more action-orientated films or stories). "His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone..." is the opening line to "The Man I Killed", and it just immediately pulls you into the proceeding vivid imagery which might inspire associated emotions. The repetition of certain lines, including the opening line, just drills in the feeling more and more as the story progresses.
In the last excerpt given to us from O'Brien's, The Things They Carried, he discusses that the stories he wrote are mostly made up. In the second paragraph he explains how he had watched the man die, but he had not actually killed him. "But Listen. Even that story is made up" he explains. He expresses how he considers writing a "form" for him to use to convey what he feels. He specifically explains that he feels guilty, or "the burden of responsibility and grief."
In O'Brien's writings, he clearly doesn't go with the norms of war stories, at least not the ones I possess. In "The Man I Killed" he focuses and spends a lot of time on a single man that the character shot and actually feels some sort of remorse and, as far as I know, has a story of how the person's life might have played out. While the condition of the corpse is quite graphic, I think that element of the story might have only been used to further get the feeling the character was feeling across to the reader. While in war movies or stories the characters might be able to just shrug off kills non-chalantly, he pays a great deal of attention in just thinking about that person. That's another interesting trait, he views the corpse as having been a person, not simply an enemy or the (infamous) "other".