Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Tim O’Brien’s incredible work, The Things They Carried, depicts the gruesome story of the Vietnam war, and gives surreal accounts of the events that took place. However, O’Brien does not do so not through concrete facts, but instead through fictional storytelling. O’Brien believes that the facts of war are not what matters in determining truth, but instead that a “true war story” moves the reader, allowing them to feel and understand the experiences of the soldiers who lived it. In the chapter titled “Good Form” O’Brien admits that the only truth to his story is that he was a foot soldier in Vietnam at the time of the war, and that everything else written “is invented.” However, in this chapter O’Brien also explains his reasoning behind using

The real truth as he depicts it is nothing more than nameless faces lying dead in the street who O’Brien could do nothing for except look away. This truth does not allow the reader to understand what O'Brien and his fellow soldiers were experiencing at the time. It is a truth of the war, but does not truthfully depict what war was like. However, the “story-truth” in O’Brien’s words, “makes things present. [O’Brien] can attach faces to grief and love and pity to God”(172). By attaching stories to deaths, and names to the faces of soldiers who otherwise would be just another killed in action, the real experiences of what it was to be a soldier in Vietnam come to life in ways cold hard facts and reality cannot. O’Brien’s book is not about war. It’s about the people who lived through the terror of being in Vietnam. As O’Brien writes “It’s about love and memory. It's about sorrow”(81). If his stories are a manifestation of his memories to formulate them more vivid and true to himself, if his writing readily depicts the sorrow he felt, then to him, there is nothing false about

As a young man, O’Brien was fully against the war. He says “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty… The only certainty that summer was moral confusion”(38). Young and quite naive, O’Brien does not see a point in nuclear warfare and does not want bloodshed for something he finds pointless. However, the war slowly changes him as he not only understands the value in meaninglessness, but eventually assimilates into the war. He becomes the embodiment of the war and it changes him for the remainder of his life. O’Brien describes, “I was part of the night. I was the land itself- everything, everywhere-... -I was autocracy- I was jungle fire, jungle drums-...-All the pale young corpses, Lee Strunk and Kiowa and Curt Lemon- I was the beast on their lips- I was Nam- the horror, the war”(199). Here, O’Brien is writing to the point that war changes you; soldiers cannot have identity during war, they are only the land and the war itself. Not becoming apart of the war would get you killed. The war forces soldiers to look directly in front of them and everything else is just a made up idea. This caused O’Brien to be suck in the war for the rest of his life. He can never escape the things he experienced and can only make sense of it through his writing. He seems to be successful in