War Does Not Have a Happy Ending

“On the Rainy River” tells the story of Tim O’Brien and what happens when he is recruited for the war. He was fresh out of college at the time, not interested in and certainly not ready to fight. O’Brien decided that he had two choices: go to war as planned and possibly die, or escape to Canada.

This chapter is really important because it shows that not every soldier actually wanted to be in Vietnam. No one deliberately signed up to kill or be killed; they were simply and randomly drafted for war. “On the Rainy River” is an upsetting chapter to read because the reader is in O’Brien’s mind, experiencing everything that he’s going through. He feels embarrassment, shame, and fear, going against the ideology that all men before going to war are excited and ready to fight for their country. O’Brien even said that he doesn’t understand why America was going into combat anyway; that he thinks only the people who support the war should have to put their lives on the line for it.

Although O’Brien ran-away to the Tip Top Lodge in Canada for six days, in the end he came back home to fight. Not out of want or love for his country, but simply because he was too embarrassed not to. When he got back home after war, he had obviously survived, but he said it was still not a happy ending for him. That goes against another ideology because just since someone gets through war without dying, their lives are not automatically back to normal. They will deal with the post-trauma war leaves the rest of their lives, which is probably more than any heroism they might feel. 


In the end, O'Brien called himself a coward because he went to war. That is a strange name for him to call himself. This is since the readers are taught to think that all soldiers are courageous for going to war, when actually the brave thing for O'Brien to do would have been to listen to what his conscience was so strongly telling him and to not have gone to Vietnam. War doesn’t create happy endings, and this chapter did a great job at explaining that through a true, entertaining and emotional story.