He liked to tell stories and rambled with the best of them. O'Brien uses him as the narrator of many of his stories. He has an odd style of telling stories, but that's not what I want to talk about. After O'Brien was shot, he hears a story about how Rat Kiley began to hear things at night. After a while he couldn't take it anymore. On page 212, we are told that "the next morning he shot himself."
This story really hit me hard. Rat Kiley, throughout the majority of the novel, is a very lively, fun character. He came to Vietnam happy and joyful, but the war changed him. He ended up shooting himself in the foot as a miserable, pathetic man. As O'Brien tells us, "nobody blamed him" for what he did (page 212). The war changed him.
I'm not quite sure if this story is true or not, but I am sure that this story is true for someone; that is what O'Brien wanted to tell the reader. The war did bring someone to that tragic act, and he wants us to feel that remorse and sorrow for those who lost their lives (or the lives they knew) to the war.
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