Fictional memoirs?

As I embarked on O'Brien's twisted journey in his fictionally challenged war story, the parallels to Tropic Thunder immediately jumped out at me.

If the trailer was not a sufficient enough summary, I'll quickly recap the film. Tropic Thunder is titled after the movie within the movie Tropic Thunder, an idea we aren't entirely new to, courtesy of Vonnegut and Dick. The fictional movie Tropic Thunder is intended to be the film version of John "Four Leaf" Tayback’s memoir on the war in Vietnam, portrayed by the characters of Stiller, Downey, Black, Jackson, and Baruchel. The filming becomes disastrous; only five days into production, the crew is already a month behind schedule. The director cannot handle the actor’s prima donna attitudes. Thus, Tayback and the director hatch up a scheme to drop the actors in the middle of the jungle, shooting them “guerilla-style” with the use of hidden cameras. Conflict arises, however, as the production has unknowingly dropped the actors in the middle of a heroin producing gang’s territory. Naturally, hilarity ensues.

The main parallel to The Things They Carried that I am emphasizing is not the obvious references to ‘Nam. As the movie progresses, it is discovered that Tayback actually was not a war veteran, but a garbage man with an idea. He had fictionalized his whole memoir. In a sense, O’Brien has done the same thing. O’Brien has taken his personal accounts from Vietnam, but has slightly altered them in that he is not the character O'Brien. Though their lives are identical, O'Brien determines that he is not his main character, under the umbrella of fiction. The deceit in The Things They Carried lies within the ambiguity of the narrator's identity. He is O'Brien the narrator, the Vietnam veteran. He is not O'Brien the author, the Vietnam veteran. He has the exact same person in an almost identical name, but not because O'Brien the narrator is fictional. Therefore, The Things They Carried is not factual, though it resembles a memoir. Likewise, Tayback of Tropic Thunder is the author and character of Tropic Thunder the memoir. However, as Tayback has not even ever left the country, Tropic Thunder is not factual, though it resembles a memoir.

Tropic Thunder is a fictional memoir as The Things They Carried is a memoir of fiction.