Finding Truth in the War Narrative

This paper explores military and media relations and dynamics beginning from the Vietnam War in the 1960s to the modern wars raging in the Middle East today with the intention of attempting to find truth within the complex narratives of wartime. Primarily, war narratives if taken from only a single source are incomplete, as there are multiple perspectives to consider while sifting through these stories. What is created is not simply an either/or narrative that we often believe, instead we get a narrative of both/and. Soldiers are both victims and perpetrators, Newsmen and women are both informers and misleaders. Multiple sources are considered here, including Hal Moore’s We Were Soldiers Once, Sebastian Junger’s film Restrepo, and Evan Wright’s Generation Kill. Such narratives are interwoven with multiple perspectives from soldiers and media personnel alike and, in doing so, integrate these perspectives in a way that allows us to get close to what the truth may be. There is no one simple truth to war, but through analyzing the perspectives of each narrative it is possible for us to get close