War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is written by Tim O’Brien and is composed of short stories about O’Brien’s “experiences” in war. The setting is placed in various locations, but mainly around the 1950’s in Vietnam. Through his non-chronological stories, the reader learns about O’Brien’s experiences in the war along with the soldiers who were in his platoon. Through the book, we see both a memoir of the war and an autobiography, however, the book is considered fictional because of his storytelling technique. He writes how a true war story is hard to tell and elucidates the connection between storytelling and his war experience. O’Brien tells how it is difficult to establish was is true from what isn’t true. In the Novel “The Things They

This element of storytelling has the power to shape the listener’s opinions on the war as he explains his version. He describes how the war is a gruesome place, and has the power to also change perceptions and morals. For example, through storytelling, he can alter the idea of beauty in death. This seemingly contradictory idea is made sense through the death of Curt Lemon. O’Brien uses the death of Curt Lemon, a soldier in his platoon, and turns it into a “love story”. O’Brien tells the story of one day, in Vietnam, Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley were tossing around a smoke bomb when all of the sudden the bomb explodes, killing Curt Lemon. He recalls that Lemon must have been blinded by the gleaming sunlight that shined brightly into his face as he was about to catch the bomb. This gruesome death was recounted by O’Brien who altered the opinion of the listener who would naturally think this would be a morbid death. Instead of focusing on the explosion of the limbs, the author instead focuses on how beautiful the sunlight was on Lemon as he died. “Sharp grey eyes, lean and narrow-wasted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight

He says that if the story seems believable, one should still be skeptical. To show this point, O’Brien recounts the story Michael Sanders tells him about his platoon going up into the mountains to listen for possible enemy movement. While Sanders tells the story to O’Brien, he continued to affirm he heard the scenario and the importance of how quiet the men were. He explains that for 7 days the men listen in the bushes and it gets a little “spooky”. He describes the scene. “…there’s always this fog – like rain, except it’s not raining – everything’s all wet and swirly and tangled up and you can’t see jack, you can’t find your own pecker to piss with. Like you don’t even have a body… and the sounds, man. The sounds carry forever. You hear stuff nobody should ever hear” (69). After the eerie scene is described, Sanders says that the men start hearing strange noises that “comes right out of the rocks”. Every night they heard this deranged sound of chimes and xylophones in the wilderness, cocktail parties, and symphony sound, etc., but no human noises. The men had finally gone mad and had enough. They called in enemy movement and blew up the area. When they get back to the base camp, they don’t talk. The general asks what they heard, and tries to be reassured that he did not spend precious bombs and aircrafts on nothing, however, the men couldn’t say anything.