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A True War Story In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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A True War Story It is very hard to tell a true war story. In Tim O’Brien’s story The Things They Carried, all the stories he tells are not completely true. O’Brien uses a lot of imagination and invention. In this story O’Brien changes his memories from war into something different, because it is so hard to tell a true war story.
For an example in pages 118-128, Tim told a story about how he threw a grenade just to scare away a young enemy soldier. Tim ended up killing the kid. This makes the reader understand how he felt when he was in Vietnam. In a video from the internet Tim had talked about the book and what this story meant. He also talked about how it was not true. The real story is how Tim and his fellow soldiers had attacked a village …show more content…

Another example of his imagination would be how O’Brien said he had a daughter, but he didn’t have one. In the book it says, “When she was nine, my daughter Kathleen asked if I had killed anyone” (125). O’Brien talks about his daughter and he comes up with all of it. He has to invent or imagine this character in order to make it a good story. By the daughter asking if he had killed anyone it catches the reader’s eye. It’s hard to write a true war story because some of the things that happen people won’t believe or are even unimaginable. So O’Brien makes his stories related to his real war story. In his mind, he changes his actual war stories into the ones in the book, so it is a good story. If he had talked about his entire time in Vietnam it would be nowhere near as interesting. He made the book

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