A person might find this hard to believe because the person who the story is being told to probably was not there during the war and thus is naïve. If the person does not know what actually happened a lot of the cruelness and savageness of the war may seem too extreme to be true. The narrator’s friend was in a state of happiness the second before he died. As he stepped on the trap, he was facing the narrator. When the trap exploded his face was illuminated, then torn apart. Without the added exaggerations the impact of the story would not have been as predominant. Then there is the question of if the story is not 100 percent true then does it matter is the impact is great? There is a mistake that people could make that the storyteller was deliberately misguiding the person who they were telling the story to. That may be so but in most cases, the story does not have to be true to the world but rather true to the people who it happened to and whoever is telling the story. What’s more important the truth or the impact it has on the people it affected.
There is another story that is told of a squad doing a listen in on enemy territory. This story also pertains to the idea that it doesn't matter how the story is told but rather that it is told and that the person listening gets the desired effect. They were supposed to be completely quiet and lay low for days and just listen. After a few days the soldiers started to hear noises, but they weren’t normal jungle noises. The soldiers heard concerts from rock shows, noises from cocktail parties. They got on their radios and called in a strike team against the area. After the area was torn up the officers asked the team that had stayed there what they had seen and heard. They knew that no one would believe they had heard noises from a rock concert so they said absolutely nothing. If the soldiers had told what had really happened, it would be easy to tell that they just experienced an episode of hysteria brought on by them staying in the jungle for days without moving. This is not what the storyteller wanted to get a across though. He didn’t want to make the soldiers look crazy, he made sure to explain that they knew that what they heard couldn’t have possibly have been heard in the jungle and that they didn’t tell anyone what really happened. The point of the story isn’t to portray these people as nuts soldiers but rather as victims of what type of effect the war can have on one’s psyche. The storytellers are trying to get this point across and on the way of accomplishing this, it is not wrong of them to change a detail here or there if the same point gets across.