War movies, do they actually tell the truth about war?

                                       
War stories and war movies are talking about the same things, but differ when it comes to first hand perspective of war. I will be examining the war movie Three Kings, starring Ice Cube, Matt Damon, and George Clooney, and I will be comparing this to the writer Tim O'Brien, and his war story The Things They Carried. In the beginning of the Three kings you hear the sound of marching, in which according to Tim O'Brien you do a lot of marching in the war, he portrays the marching as a mindless activity.  These soldiers sneak out of a camp in order to find a secret location filled with Huddan's gold. They then start to have an internal conflict when they come to confiscate Huddans gold, and come across a family about to be executed. In the end of this conflict they decide to help the family.

The part that is most critical is the ending, it determines the moral, and it determines if it's a true war story or not by the way it ends. According to Tim O'Brien the moral of a war story isn't supposed to be easily understandable. The ending isn't supposed to be uplifting, and not everyone (or no one) gets what they want in the end. Three Kings, I would say is not a true war story because they simply go against everything that Tim O'Brien s way of a true war story. In the end, the soldiers don't get in trouble for sneaking out and going AWOL. They, unrealistically give away all the gold, and the people they rescued go off to live their lives happily. This didn't portray a true war story to me at all.