This chapter presents the idea of controlling reality and memory through story. The narrator (Tim O’Brien) tells us how reality and memory can be twisted by a story, and that a story is the only thing that will remain in time. He says, “Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” (38) The reader knows that the narrator places more importance on the story than the actual memory (reality). In this chapter, it seems like the men don’t want to remember the reality of what they experienced, so they made up stories that eventually took the place of the reality. (Deluding themselves to keep their sanity) It is clear that the men in the story had serious emotional and psychological baggage from their expieriences. Things were so mind-warping where these men were that ordinary things like “boredom” were psychologically tormenting. When the men were bored they would feel the boredom dripping inside them like “a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at your important organs.” (34) (Boredom made them crazy) The man that shacked up with a Red Cross Nurse came back because he was bored, “All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.” (35) That man had too much  ”peace”  (boredom) and he just kept remembering bad things, he had to get away from that.  For the men, “The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.” (34) It seems like Tim O’Brien’s message was that when people expeireince traumatic events in their lives (like the soldiers) they create their own reality through stories to keep themselves sane, they don’t want to deal with reality (like they would have to if they were bored and had alot of time to think on their hands) The stories are an outlet because after a while they will have told the stories so much that they will have altered their memory into beleiving that the story was true, but the traumas will always stay with them “in their own dimension” until they die, and then all that will be left is their war stories and not the “baggage” they carried from all of the traumas they went through.